UNDERLINE : RECENT ARTWORKS BY JUDY YANG
Whitebox Art Center presents
Underline: Recent Work by Judy Yang
On view February 4th to 25th 2015
Opening reception February 6th | 6-9pm
New York City – Underline is an exhibition presenting recent work by Joo Jeon Judy Yang, curated by Argentine curator Lucila Gradin. Judy Yang’s work arises from the artist’s own merging of visual traditions wrought from her East Asian lineage and Western experience, evoking coded landscapes and meticulously layered architectural renderings, taking influences from religious myth and social catastrophes, to talk about the political consequences of media manipulation.
In the exhibition there will be two bodies of work in dialogue. On one side Judy Yang will present three large-scale scraped boards from her series “Mistreatment of Life,” developed after the artist’s own first-hand experience of the 2010 foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak, after which Yang began to question the economy of food and health in our society. On the other side of the exhibition space, seven currency collages from the series “One Nation Banknote” will be displayed, recomposing the idealized iconography of real international currency to reveal an underlying narrative of social catastrophe.
These formally engaging, rigorous and labor-intensive works reference on one hand the vertical spaces and textured expanses of Asian scroll painting landscapes, while simultaneously calling to mind the heavily etched lines influenced by Western print masters.
This collection of pieces demands close examination: a slow, careful review akin to the study of evidence. Such a forensic visual investigation prompts the exploration of different approaches to morality through the highly detailed spaces of an East/West hybrid, filtered through the artist’s deft hand and careful, sensitive rendering.
The title of the show references the crawling television news ticker, which the artist interprets as the bearer of real information in the face of the distracting, manipulated spectacle of the images “breaking” on the screen.
Curated by Lucila Gradin
