JIWOONG JANG (b. 1985, Seoul) is based in New York City. Studio Art BFA School of Visual Art Photography and Video 2018. Hunter MFA Studio Art 2023. jiwoong's practice is built on delicate observations and connections. Working in post-photography, he explores how the charge of past experiences, pleasant or painful, informs new or anticipated encounters in unexpected ways. These instances of surprise, moments that are surprisingly painful or surprisingly beautiful, are collected and transmuted into photography and sculpture, often thinking in terms of exhibition and narrative structure.

Education

Selected Group Exhibitions

Publications

Alex Batkin

Ashley Teamer

Brian Oakes

jiwoong

Kyle Clairmont Jacques

Stephen Buscemi

Blade Study is pleased to announce EPIPHANY, a group exhibition focused on the intuitive experience of realization. The internal shift of an epiphany is not linear or universal, it can take the form of a variety of emotional reactions. It is a jolting experience that can evoke terror, or relief, it can be ecstatic, or soothing. Beyond the precise moment of its arrival, an epiphany redirects one’s lifepath and personal philosophy. Works by artists Alex Batkin, Ashley Teamer, Brian Oakes, jiwoong, Kyle Clairmont Jacques, and Stephen Buscemi are brought together to explore this unique emotional state in its various forms.

Acupuncturist Alex Batkin’s expansive artistic practice is informed by ongoing research into ancient health practices and sexual technologies. His four piece sculptural project, Ersatz Phallus Artifacts I-IV, stems from his interest in the depiction of pubic hair in various Greek funerary statues from the 6th century BC, several of which appear to be wearing cock rings. Although this is not directly acknowledged by art historical and literary references, the cock rings’ obvious visual presence became the basis of Batkin’s historically-grounded speculative artistic project, as it occurred to him that kink stretches back to our earliest days as humans. Ersatz Phallus Artifacts I-IV gives emphasis to Batkin’s realization that the maintenance and pleasure of the human body are recreations of a collective, queer past.

Painter and installation artist, Ashley Teamer is inspired by the batture, the fluctuating space of clay and sand between the low-tide of the Mississippi River and the levee. In her words, “The Batture symbolizes the plasticity of our environment, the relationship between humans and nature, and reveals strategies for living with nature in the future.” You Are Now Tuned In… and Bonnet Carré Spillway Vignette speak to the ecological, political conditions of NOLA as historic moments that inform Teamer’s personhood. Both artworks explore how human interventions to make the environment more habitable is fraught with contrasting morals.

Brian Oakes’ kinetic chandelier, Vessel 2, gossips, breathes, and twitches. The sculpture’s projected audio mimics its aural surroundings at a 15 second delay. This is not to say it shares everything it hears. The artwork is selective, picking up some sounds at a range of distances while ignoring others. The echos produced from its feathered tendrils generate a special kind of disorienting attention, making it seem as though Oakes’ work is itself at the fraught moment before a breakthrough.

jiwoong’s site specific installation of Ceramic Light Vessels are the result of years of nightly walks taken by the artist. This practice began as part of the artist’s mandatory military service, followed him through the years of his early adulthood, ultimately informing the artist’s graduate thesis work at Hunter MFA. The sculpture is created by placing silver gelatin print on ceramic rock formations, a process invented by jiwoong. This sprawling work examines the site of epiphany - how the mundane, circulation of movement and place can become generative.

In a moment of personal change, artist and curator Kyle Clairmont Jacques began to fixate on kites. Kites are a meditative reprieve for Jacques, he was drawn to the duality of their “purpose”, their ability to catch the wind transforming an unseen element visible. His sculptural wall work, Flare (2023), is the result of a two year investigation into this original subject, with emphasis on the classic Flare model kite. Rendered in acrylic paint on poly silk over galvanized steel on panel, the poly silk is then dipped in a diluted adhesive that hardens material and allows for translucency.This final object stands in for the process oriented artistic practice Jacques developed in the wake of his own epiphany.

Stephen Buscemi’s airbrushed acrylic paintings depict an air of uncertainty. In his works, Buscemi presents a version of epiphany as an unsettling experience and evolving self. The flanking works of the triptych focus on hazy images of hands reaching through darkness towards an inconclusive future. In the center work, pleading eyes peek through pitch black. Critical to the conceit of the show, Buscemi’s paintings image the grave uncertainty that can accompany a revelation.

Press Release

Epiphany

Fluttered leg and arm motions cut through the water: back and forth, back and forth. Maintaining a steady breath: in and out, in and out. A swimmer treading water holds their body upright keeping the head, chest, and shoulders above the surface as their arms and legs move continuously. It may appear like they aren't moving much at all, but maintaining the verticality of the position requires coordination hidden just below the surface. The youngest of six, jiwoong's uncle Kyungmin Joo (b.1975-2024) was a beloved and boisterous man. Tragically, after surviving a motorcycle accident in his twenties, the artist observed his uncle's personality shrink. He kept to his room, watched baseball, smoked cigarettes, and talked on the phone. He lived like a ghost, drifting through the family home at odd hours. In hindsight, jiwoong recalls his late uncle in this way: a person treading water.

 is jiwoong's first solo exhibition with the gallery. Using photographic techniques, welded metal, and augmented ready-mades, the artist laces his uncle's lived experiences and observed behaviors with the items and architecture of the apartment where he, his uncle, his mother, and aunt lived in Seoul. The exhibition makes use of a photographic archive from the artist and his family. Two UV on durabond panels, 

, were taken by the artist on his last visit to Korea in 2021, which image splashes of light contouring the walls of their home. In the entirety of his family's photos, there is only one image of jiwoong's uncle: a picnic scene, which the artist has distorted and segmented into a grid of twelve panels in the wall work 

. Though a pleasant moment, the scene was striking to jiwoong, how the splay of food, scattered shoes, reaching hands, and squinting eyes mimicked his uncle's accident. His composition is selective, illustrating how a traumatic change ripples through every part of a survivor's life, even the past. 

, varied metal boxes laid on the floor, reference the limp Joo walked with after his accident. One mirrored acrylic panel has a hair brush laid on it, acting as a displacement, a good memory hidden in plain sight.

Joo's dedication to baseball is reimagined by the artist as an example of samsara. A baseball player runs in a circle, returning home only to begin again on his next run. At the end of the cycle comes release. Rendered in metal, 

 (2025) mimics the birth of a celestial body. Around the time of Joo's death, NASA published the first ever photograph of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. Seeing this, Jiwoong wondered if this is a possible suggestion for the afterlife, a transfer of energy. Amidst his grief, he noticed the distance between himself and his uncle's fading presence, then rebirth, perhaps as a star.

jiwoong

Exhibitions

Selected Works

Education

Selected Group Exhibitions

Publications