Victoria! Jang!

Born: 1987 Hackensack, New Jersey; lives and works in Baltimore, MD



Victoria Jang’s new ceramic sculpture, layered with multiple narratives, composed in a period of darkness. With a vocabulary of decorative ornamental forms, Jang’s sculptures are a critical inquiry of ethnology as expressed through colonial ideology, stigmatizing indigenous cultural legacies. First-generation Korean-American, Victoria Jang takes aim at assumptions of Western European culture in its understanding and interpreting of non-Western cultures as inferior, while historically appropriating traditions, rituals and objects for aesthetic and cultural exploitation.

Her ceramic vessels become microcosms of deconstructed colonial hegemony. Focusing on Korean traditions found in native craft and materials, Jang creates a musical panoply of abstracted geometric and natural forms that she can use and reassemble. The 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.