HaYoung Abby Jung, “Little Girls,” 2019, Acrylic and Drywall, 10ft. x 50 ft. Courtesy of the artist.
To celebrate graduating seniors in the School of Art + Design Class of 2020, Krannert Art Museum is sharing their work.
I want my artwork to generate conversations about social issues, especially ones that we are encouraged to ignore. I do this by placing strategic sentences in specific contexts to identify unspoken truths. Using certain fonts and color theory, I emphasize these ideas and create my own suggestions.
While my work often focuses on race and ethnicity, there are many more ideas that are interconnected, for instance culture, class, gender, and sexuality. They are all distinctive ideas, but they all exist in the same spaces. This is not usually recognized. By allowing these things to exist together within my art, I hope to create conversations relevant to a wide variety of people. The fetishization of Asian women in the Western world is something that many different women can relate to, Asian people can understand, but also something that anyone facing tokenism can come to realize. I prioritize this overlapping of ideas in my artwork.
Along with fonts and color theory, time is a significant aspect of my work. I often paint my text directly into specific sites. By painting onto walls, I make my marks on physical and institutional space. Often times, my work is painted over. It is no longer visible, but becomes a permanent part of an institution.