At the age of 14, Janice Yang and her family emigrated from South Korea to the U.S. in the wake of a financial crisis that upended their sense of security. (Incidentally, the Korean stock market is experiencing a historic crash this month in the wake of unwinding global trade in the AI sector.) Displaced from everything they knew, her family had to start again. “Our stable economic situation in Korea changed to more precarious working-class reality in the U.S., where repeated business failures left us in a lot of debt,” Yang tells Colossal.
For two decades, Yang worked unpaid at her family’s small sushi restaurant, where she dreamed of eventually pursuing her studies to become an artist, all while navigating a new culture and helping to carry her family’s financial burden. “These years of labor and adaptation have profoundly shaped my identity as a first-generation immigrant and my artistic practice,” she says. Her figurative paintings, which often center self-portraits amid busy kitchens, are accompanied by dream-like clouds and distant vistas that open up in walls and windows or float around the figures’ heads. There’s also a lot of fish.
Whether filleted, whole, chopped, or cooking, salmon are prevalent in many of Yang’s compositions. In a sense, they were the artist’s constant companions for years. “Every day, I saw salmon getting flayed and prepped in plastic wrap to be stored into the fridge,” she says. “I would develop personal feelings to salmon and personify them, since they reminded me the unfulfilled dream I had as an artist.” They also represent the desire to return home.
Every year, salmon complete the physically demanding biological process of spawning, in which they migrate from the ocean to their native freshwater streams and rivers to lay eggs. Huge numbers of the fish home in on the place they were born, fighting their way upstream to ensure the survival of the next generation. “This related to my feelings and hopes to reach my dream and find the sense of belonging in a new place where I felt often lost,” Yang says. Occasionally, her paintings incorporate salmon ash along with acrylic and oil pigments.
The artist also nods to symbolic elements of Korean art history and visual culture, such as a scroll painting by Ahn Gyeon, a court painter during Joseon Dynasty in the 15th century. The unfurled work sits on the lap of the figure in “Ahn Gyeon’s Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land.” The painting is now held in a collection in Japan, and Yang describes how Koreans hope to see the painting returned to its homeland someday. Korean aesthetics converge with classical Western artistic methods like one-point perspective. Yang says, “For me, this blending of visual languages becomes a way to think through ideas of home, coexistence, and contradiction, and to reflect on the complexity of diasporic identity.”
Starting next month, Yang will be an artist-in-residence at Gallery MOMO in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she will also present an exhibition. And in September, she will commence a nine-month artist residency at Lillstreet Art Center in Chicago, where she will teach, in addition to being a visiting lecturer at the School of the Art Institute’s Painting and Drawing Department. See more on Yang’s Instagram.
