Jee Hwang

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.

Two examples illustrate this process:

One summer, a student plucked an unremarkable weed from a parking lot—a habit from growing up on a farm. The weed, spread out like a wig, became part of a dance, which I later captured in a drawing.

Another time, a giant tumbleweed blew onto campus. Having never seen one in person, I brought it into my studio and immersed myself in its presence, eventually creating a still performance that became a painting.

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.

Inspired by observing human relationships in and around communities of various types -- including gender, geography and nation -- my works speak about different forms of human desire. I see the human body as a metaphoric vessel holding individual desire, memories, and history. Through representational figurative paintings in oil and water media, I explore how bodies transmit desire and form relationships through metaphoric gestures that reveal the border between an individual’s psychological state and the desires of groups of people, community and public.

 “Women Eating Flower” series focus on how beauty and violence can be reciprocity of such desire through the language of painting. As a symbol of beauty and purity, images and painting of flowers have been associated with the female body within the history of art. As a rebellious and self-destructing gesture, eating flower allude to violent nature of desire and obsession to the beauty. By painting the women eating flower, I intend to seek the way desire has been coded as a visual representation of women in the history of art and visual culture.

My work started from the intent to express the struggle of human desire through everyday scenes and objects. Influenced by social and environmental factors, each individual’s actions and gestures can be an expression of that human desire as well. Those desires becomes more clear when he tries to clarify the boundary of himself with others, creating tension and emotional energy. In the battle of inner-self during everyday life, that awareness of “others” in his surroundings creates another motif for actions and habits. 

The image of other people’s connected bodies leads to different directions of his desires and actions. People’s desires can be suppressed or spread with their voices by making similar, but different gestures. As we experience from our relationships with friends, colleagues and family members, different power structures are created when a person is by themselves or with two, or three and more. The monologue started from one’s own thoughts grown into drama, syndrome, and social phenomena as the number of active participants increases. 

It is not clear whether the image of the body becomes a trigger to psychological desire or the other way. The physical manifestation of desire is mixed up with individuals since one continuously slides between the border of themselves and others. In the midst of desire to be separated from others and to be part of everyone, a monologue started from the jar holds a familiar yet distinct voice of its own.

My narrative started from how I observe human desire. Whether it is a small matter of having a meal or perhaps finding a soul mate in life, we try to make ourselves satisfied constantly. As soon as one desire is fulfilled, we keep looking for something else we want, creating a lack in ourselves. There was an impressive expression describing a similarity between life and number system in  Peter Hoeg’s novel “Smila’s Sense of Snow”  that the state of the child’s longing resembles the negative numbers. Considering a small child born with the whole and positive number, as child feel there is something missing, those sense of longing becomes infinite negative numbers.  Given that we are not so different than a child, life becomes a bottomless hole, abyss or a void. Along with perpetuity of the desire, desires are temperamental, capricious and comparative by each person in each situation. Sometimes we don’t know what we actually want, but we feel something is missing.  Like so, desire is uncertain and abstract as well as unstable.

We try to fulfill the desire without knowing what it is. And yet, one’s body seems to be a bottomless container regardless of his effort. In my painting, I created scenes where I use images of the  body and objects as a metaphor of desire. The gesture of the body and the scenes I use in my painting reflect my own dilemmas and struggles in daily life. They are another form of desire, dissatisfaction and the unknown.  I ask question to myself and try to answer the mystery about  life and desire.  Rather than an answer, I only wish to fill any absence and void by trying my best.

By depicting the actions of figures covering their faces, I explore longing and the struggle to let out thoughts and desires

There is something that disables communication. We try to exchange our thoughts and ideas with others but those attempts are imperfect. I believe every person has their own abyss that they cannot share with anyone else. It is also the deepest private room in mind, unshared moments, and untold stories. In my work, the figures have concealed their faces by turning their heads or with objects such as a bag or stone. These barriers or obstacles refer to both the impossibility of being understood by others and understanding others. The frustration coming from imperfect communication leads to another desire of concealment. As a result of failed communication, seeking for escape from others and hiding in a personal place gives comfort.

I have something to say. I have something to say but it cannot be said. It needs to be revealed but will never be perfect if I try. Nevertheless the pursuit of longing continues by all means.

In my portrayal of women’s bodies, I use personal metaphor to communicate my thoughts. The subjects that I handle in my painting always speak for my identity. Whether it is a flower coming out of my mouth, or fragile empty jars, I use them to reflect both my desires and the missing things in my life. 
Searching through the depiction of action and figure, I also seek a way to express endless human desire. A human body is a container which holds the libido, physical and psychological desires and the trauma that is caused by failure to fulfill them. They are part of life, which makes up our memories and time, creating a void and gaps.

People’s habitual action to fill in the gaps has been a trigger to my own subject. Through creating paintings and drawings, I try to express my desire to communicate with others.