Unui Jang

Formal Experiment Embedded with Narrative: “Portrait of Ekkehard Neumann” and a Green Apple
Sung-eun Kang

You see two photos of the same exhibition space. There are paintings of a green apple on a plate hang on either side of a white door. Both the space and the paintings on display look the same. But if you take a closer look, you will see that the apple is placed in a slightly different direction in the two paintings. The photos show an installation view of the artist Unui Jang’s solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst Enniger, a modern and contemporary art museum in Germany, held in 2018 and 2019, respectively titled “Two Circles: The Way Two Different Worlds Coexist,” and “The Summer, When Apples Fall.”

Jang named these two exhibition views the “Portrait of Ekkehard Neumann and A Green Apple.” Ekkehard Neumann, a German artist and curator, expressed his liking for the “coldness” he felt in the painting of an apple featured in Jang’s 2018 solo exhibition. Jang says she felt strange when Ekkehard Neumann recognized the very coldness in her works that she had considered negatively for a long time and saw in a positive light. In 2019, Jang returned to the same place for another solo exhibition and reproduced the “apple room.” She also invited Neumann to the exhibition and asked him to write about it. Upon her request, the German writer composed an article on the “clear coldness” he felt in her painting of the green apple.

The green apple that the artist painted was one that had been dumped on the ground because it was too small and acidic to eat. Jang placed this useless small apple in a white bowl and created a painting out of it. And then she projected herself onto the feeling that Neumann felt in her painting. The artist expressed the feeling that she shared with Neumann through her work by reproducing the same exhibition. This is her way of showing her own relationship with others, reconciliation with herself, or recognition of herself. After the two successive solo exhibitions, she has expanded and developed the green apple in her works. For instance, painted a green apple placed on various kinds of objects and also enlarged the size of the canvas. Jang experimented with changes using color contrast, replacing the white bowl with a dark blue one, and continued to experiment with the feeling of coldness in various ways.

In 2017, when Jang saw some grapes that had fallen in a wineglass in the sink, she thought the combination of the artificially produced perfect round shape of the wineglass and the natural oval shaped grapes were the ideal of beauty. Since then, the artist has been painting fruits placed on top of goods from a top-down view. In pictures with such a composition, different objects would be replaced with different fruits to create a wide range of variations. In the process, the subject that appeared most often were green apples.

Unui Jang has always said that her works are about “relationships.” She took pictures of a sudden unfamiliar moment or special moment she experienced in ordinary everyday life and painted that moment on canvas. She painted everyday landscapes and still lifes, depicting playgrounds, empty apartment buildings, pieces of neatly peeled fruits on dishes, and rice in a bowl. Her works represent the relationship between the artist herself and people around her and the ambience of the space where a certain event took place. In her work, Jang has been emphasizing the narrative aspects.

In her paintings of “fruits placed on top of objects,” there is a slight shift from expressing narratives to pursuing the beauty of form. Jang creates her works through a rational and systematic procedure. When she puts fruit on objects such as dish or a flower vase, she carefully positions the still object in view of the direction of light and shadows. And then she sest a camera horizontally right over the still object and photographs it, vertically looking down at it. She paints the picture afterwards. The process of transferring the objects captured by the camera to canvas also follows a precise plan. Jang sketches with a pencil on a canvas with a faint blue background, applying thin colors along the lines. In this process, there seems to be no room for chance to be involved.

Tension is ripe within Unui Jang’s paintings. The background of the painting is not the real surface on which still objects are laid. Shadows between the background and the still life create space, so the object seems to be detached from the surface. Fruits look as if they are suspended in the air right over an object. For viewers, they look the paintings that are drawn in a view above the objects from the side. And the still object do not look stable at all as they are seen from the side. Such instability is a kind of visual tension resulting from the inconsistency between the viewer’s perspective and camera angle when photographing the still objects.

In these works, the objects or fruits do not represent the artist’s personal experience. She focuses on the very act of painting, which results from depicting the subtlety of a shape seen from a fixed viewpoint. She tries to achieve formative beauty of painting, which has not been recognized along the way but was manifested in her previous works. Rather paradoxically, the artist has just begun her formal experimentation experimenting that is embedded with her personal narrative.

Unui Jang sometimes uses photos of her own still-life paintings spread out and photographed from the side for posters and brochures of her exhibitions. By doing so, the artist reveals that an object that looked like a blue circle at first is actually a vase cinched at the waist; the shape of walking boots is recognizable and the depth of a bowl and the designs engraved on the side of a cup can be seen. Showing the original shape of still objects seen from above, the artist reminds us of what the objects look like in everyday life.

For artists today, everyday life has become very important material for their work. Artists draw out from everyday life objects, memories, events, and formative beauty that are ordinary and easily overlooked and lay them out before us. Jang believes that the ideal beauty she has found in daily life boils down to reciprocal exchange between narrative and formative beauty. Let us go back to the “Portrait of Ekkehard Neumann.” You will now be able to see what Unui Jang has recreated in her second exhibition.