Jee Hwang

Jee Hwang holds an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute and a BFA from Salisbury University in Maryland. Her professional experience includes residencies at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, ChaNorth Artist Residency, the Wassaic Project, and the Vermont Studio Center, where she received a partial fellowship. Hwang received the Emma Bee Bernstein Award and Fellowship from A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn.

Hwang's work has been shown in regional and national exhibitions, including venues across New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, and Seoul. Recently, she was awarded Second Place at the Mountain Plains Contemporary Art Biennial from Salina Art Center in Kansas and selected for the group exhibition "Through a BIPOC Lens: Decolonizing Feminism" at Women Made Gallery in Chicago. Hwang is represented by Accola Griefen Gallery in New York, Brooklyn.

Currently residing in Kansas, Hwang serves as an Associate Professor of painting at Fort Hays State University.

Inspired by observing human relationships in and around communities of various types -- including gender, geography and nation -- my works speak about different forms of human desire. I see the human body as a metaphoric vessel holding individual desire, memories, and history. Through representational figurative paintings in oil and water media, I explore how bodies transmit desire and form relationships through metaphoric gestures that reveal the border between an individual’s psychological state and the desires of groups of people, community and public. “Women Eating Flower” series focus on how beauty and violence can be reciprocity of such desire through the language of painting. As a symbol of beauty and purity, images and painting of flowers have been associated with the female body within the history of art. As a rebellious and self-destructing gesture, eating flower allude to violent nature of desire and obsession to the beauty. By painting the women eating flower, I intend to seek the way desire has been coded as a visual representation of women in the history of art and visual culture.

KS