Artificial Artifact
with Victoria Jang / June 2022
About the Studio Session
Artificial: as in phony; as in imitation; as in not ‘authentic’; as in fake; as in fake in a very good way; as in questioning established constructs of value.
Artifact: (1) the kind of object in a plexiglass case, in a darkened museum hall, with a label attributing the object’s current owner instead of its maker; (2) the dozens of lookalike objects that look a lot like the vase you saw in that museum collection, that also have no attributable maker but were definitely made by hand, that are now lined up in a tourist shop with unbelievably cheap prices; (3) the kind of object that your parents inherited from your grandparents, that your parents brought with them when they immigrated, that your parents later gave to you, that now sits on your coffee table; (4) an object through which you can measure your own sense of belonging.
Artificial Artifact: recreating or entirely reinventing objects as a way of reconstructing parts of ourselves; a method for cracking the code of our generational past; a form of personal archaeology; the subversion of histories; the reimagining of futures.
Artificial Artifact Studio Session: articulating our metaphysical attachment to objects by way of discussing and materializing the above (see: Artificial; Artifact; Artificial Artifact).
About the Lead Artist
Victoria Jang received her fine arts education from the University of Washington and California College of the Arts. She has exhibited widely across the U.S. and has received numerous awards, including Headlands Center for the Arts Fellowship, National Council on Education of Ceramics Art’s Retired Teachers Award, and Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Arts Award. Jang has spent the last few years as the Association of Independent Colleges of Arts and Design Teaching Fellow at Maryland Institute College of Arts in Baltimore, Maryland. Jang is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, California.
First-generation, Victoria Jang’s work takes aim at assumptions of Western European culture in understanding and interpreting non-Western cultures as inferior, while historically abstracting traditions, rituals, and objects for aesthetic exploitation. Her ceramic vessels become microcosms of deconstructed colonial moral and aesthetic principles. Focusing on the traditions found in Korean craft and materials, Jang creates a musical panoply of abstracted geometric and natural forms she can use and reassemble. Her ceramic sculptures are layered with these shapes, stemmed flower forms, ritual objects found in Korean Shamanism, surface aspects of urban erosion and decay - a fused assemblage of synthesized symbolist ornaments.
Victoria Jang’s series of new ceramic sculptures are layered with double meanings, visual tempo, and texture. With a vocabulary of decorative ornamental forms, Jang's sculptures are a critical inquiry on colonial ideology expressed in ethnology, the stigmatization and ownership of indigenous artifacts, and its interlude to social progress.