Victoria Jang’s latest body of work is a series of ceramic sculptures 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.
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 received her fine arts education from the University of Washington and California College of the Arts and has gone on to receive numerous awards which include, the Association of Independent Colleges of Arts and Design Teaching Fellow, Headlands Center for the Arts Fellowship, National Council on Education of Ceramics Art’s Retired Teachers Award, and Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Arts Award and has exhibited widely across the U.S. Jang has spent the last 5 years teaching Ceramics and First Year Experience at Maryland Institute College of Arts in Baltimore, Maryland. Jang is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery in Los Angeles, California.
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