ARTIST STATEMENT
Crossing Boundaries
Adjustment and cultural negotiation form the core of my artistic practice, deeply influenced by my immigration experience to the United States. The process of confronting radically different cultures, languages, and social norms has reshaped my identity, making the familiar obsolete. Figurative painting allows me to confront these lived struggles, giving shape to the complexities of human experience through forms, gestures, objects, and ideas. I believe the body is a vessel of history, memories, and desires—an abyss of deeply personal and internal topologies that shape both expression and longing. Moving to foreign places brings forth struggles: the longing for relevance from an irrelevant past, the need to express thoughts and desires, and the yearning for a certain future that is no longer imaginable. These individual reckonings extend into the collective, influencing communities and societies. My environment provides metaphorical vessels and perspectives for my work. Nature, ephemera, and local culture offer rich sources of meaning. Trees, houseplants, weeds, and tumbleweeds symbolize the native and the immigrant, the rooted and the unrooted. I photograph performances involving these subjects, translating their gestures into drawings and paintings. Through my creative practice, I explore the evolving nature of identity, belonging, and home in the face of cultural displacement and adaptation. It offers space to contemplate our bodies, our sense of place, and the concept of home, questioning where we truly belong and how our identities evolve with every new landscape we inhabit.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jee Hwang holds an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute and a BFA from Salisbury University in Maryland. Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, Hwang was trained in realism from a young age. Her professional experience includes residencies at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vashon Artist Residency, ChaNorth Artist Residency, the Wassaic Project, and the Vermont Studio Center, where she received a partial fellowship. Hwang received the Emma Bee Bernstein Award and Fellowship from A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn. Her work has been shown in regional and national exhibitions, including venues across New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, and Seoul. Recently, she was awarded Second Place at the Mountain Plains Contemporary Art Biennial from Salina Art Center in Kansas and selected for the group exhibition Through a BIPOC Lens: Decolonizing Feminism at Women Made Gallery in Chicago. Hwang is represented by Accola Griefen Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. She recently made the transition from Kansas to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she was appointed as an Associate Professor of Painting at Grand Valley State University.
© Jee Hwang