Microscope is very pleased to present an evening of moving image works by Korea-born, New York-based artist Hey-Yeun Jang. The program includes films, videos and 35mm slide works spanning more than 20 years, from the artist’s 1995 Super VHS video “self-denial”, made in grad school, to her 2016 “flickering” a dual 35mm slide projection piece reworking earlier Super 8mm footage of her own eye, as well as a new work-in-progress on 16mm film. Jang’s work is at once diaristic and structural, impromptu and staged, embracing accidents and repurposing them as formal elements. It is grounded in her interaction with luminosity and darkness, and the manipulation of the visible through the technologic eye of the camera generating sudden bursts of light, radical shifts in frame speed, shadow plays, swift panning, which ultimately contribute to reveal reality as intimately constituted of light.
In “(k)now (t)here”, a tightly edited film dairy, the artist records snippets of one-way trips taken in the summer of 2009 as she decided to open herself up to chance and unforeseen experiences. Her presence throughout the footage emerges through unexpected reflections on mirrors of herself looking through her Bolex, and “by being anonymous, like subtle sound gets amplified in complete silence or dim light grows conspicuous in total darkness”. “Picture Day: flip side” (2007) documents an elementary school's Picture Day, and the children’s struggle to smile and appear natural on camera, while “flickering” (1995-2016) is a slowed-down, deconstructed slide show of consecutive frames the artist shot by accident of her own eye, inverting the relationship between seer and seen.
Jang will be in attendance and available for Q&A after the screening.
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Hey-Yeun Jang is a Korea-born, New York-based installation and film artist. She often uses sequences of 16mm film still images to examine fleeting moments and meaning of swallowed words: explore in-between.
Her installation works have been exhibited widely in museums internationally: Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, Germany), Wurttembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (Stuttgart, Germany), Queens Museum (New York, USA), Carrillo Gil Museum (Mexico City, Mexico), Centro Cultural Tijuana (Tijuana, Mexico), National Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul, Korea), Hangaram Art Museum (Seoul, Korea), Pacific Art Museum (Seoul, Korea), Museum 63 Artist Commune (Hong Kong, China), Bund 18 Creative Center (Shanghai, China), and Ludwig Foundation of Cuba (Havana, Cuba).
Her films have been screened at film venues: New York Film Festival (New York, NY), Rotterdam Film Festival (Rotterdam, Netherlands), Edinburgh International Film Festival (Edinburgh, UK), VIDEOEX (Zurich, Switzerland), Chicago Underground Film Festival (Chicago, IL), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), Brooklyn Museum of Art (Brooklyn, NY), National Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul, Korea), Anthology Film Archives (New York, NY), Los Angeles County Museum (Los Angeles, CA), the Berkeley Art Museum (Berkley, CA), and Kabuki Theater (San Francisco, CA), Echo Park Film Center (Los Angeles, CA), Knitting Factory (New York, NY), LG Art Center (Seoul, Korea). Her exhibitions have received reviews including Art in America, the New York Times, New York Arts, Berliner Zeitung, Stuttgart Zeitung, Asia Art Pacific, Taipei Times, Korea Times.
She received her BFA in sculpture from Ewha Women’s University (Seoul, Korea) in 1991, BFA in sculpture from San Francisco Art Institute in 1994 and MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1996.