David Jang: Prequel to 2018

Jang’s exacting, fanciful and obsessive re-­appropriation of common materials articulates the countervailing forces inherent in what is considered “the everyday” within our world. Through a special transformation of “everyday” materials into kinetically-engineered and freestanding sculpture, he brings out poignant thoughts relating to expansion and contraction, perfection and imperfection, force and balance, having and lacking. He deconstructs, reprograms and re-constitutes industrial and commercial cast-offs to reveal new relationships. Coded also into each of these objects, and the materials from which they are composed, are its life’s instructions. He examines these codes and the continuum of the objects, to discover the hidden subtexts and hierarchies they uphold. Ultimately, Jang’s work is about survival, or what he calls ‘life tactic’. In its performative aspect, he seeks to establish intimacy with the consumer material, transforming it into “machines that are at once hilarious, frightening, and charming.”