Victoria Jang / Victoria Jang

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.

Victoria Jang received her BFA in ceramics and sculpture from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2010. She moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and received her MFA in ceramics at the California College of the Arts in 2014. Jang received a Headlands Graduate Fellowship Award, a Murphy Award and Cadogan Scholarship, and was the featured artist for the 2014 APAture exhibition at Kearny Street Workshop. She recently received the 2017–18 AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she continues to teach, and the Retired Professors Award by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. She was a Visiting Artist in Residence for 2015-2016 at the University of California, Berkeley.