“All things are created and destined to be broken someday. I think being
broken and damaged is never a bad thing. All of us develop scars
throughout our lives. But these scars should never be hidden. Our
imperfections can be the birth of something new.”
Hiroki Kiyokawa
It is indispensable: Everything that comes into being will eventually perish. The artist Jazoo Yang devotes her art to the traces of the ephemeral. She is interested in damage and injuries. Details that are more than the whole. As an artist, Jazoo Yang focuses on the real, not the perfect. The fact is that all the scars we collect over the course of a lifetime make us who we are. They are part of us. We don’t have to hide our scars as flaws, says Hiroki Kiyokawa, we should wear them proudly.
Where perfection means stagnation, imperfection offers the chance to grow. Only where something ends does something new emerge.
This principle can be applied to many things. Jazoo Yang finds traces of becoming and passing away in urban spaces. The artist, who comes from South Korea and lives in Berlin, goes on forays and collects fragments of the ephemeral. She takes fragments from her surroundings, documents them and places them in the foreground. For her, city and nature are not contradictory. Urbanity is nature in an urban environment.
Yang experiments with materials and media in her creative work and seeks out breaks. By casting fragments in resin, for example, she redefines connections – including temporal ones. She creates collages and forms of expression in which she creates a new field of tension in relationships. She transfers the tensions she finds in the city and nature into her works, thus fanning out various possible interpretations. The boundary between the organic and the inorganic always plays a role. In her “Thorns” series, Jazoo Yang approaches nature in its rhythmic patterns. To this end, she shaved thorns from branches that she found in various places in Berlin and rearranged them in her works. The result is dynamic-looking objects that lose their organic nature with new associations. In the context of art, they become inorganic and something completely new.
Jazoo Yang, originally from South Korea, lives and works in Berlin. Originally a painter, she opened up to new media and methods as a mixed-media artist. She developed a collage process based on her interest in memory, transience, identity, localization and urban spaces. Using synthetic resin, she creates objects that oscillate between two- and three-dimensionality and places elements of urban nature in new contexts. Yang deals with forgetting and decay. With a fascination for nostalgia, she gives space to preservation – but always in the certainty that the new can only emerge from the past.