specimens no 202104 Drawing

Born in South Korea Live & work : Berlin <-> South Korea Jazoo Yang is a Korean mixed media artist based in Berlin. She often distorts public spaces to profound ends. With a mixture of concept-focused art and an intriguing visual palette, she questions the relationship between ourselves and the spaces that we inhabit. Her more recent practice has focused on the transformation of housing in the city and the gentrification that is pushing local residents from their homes. The 'Materials Series' is an amalgamation of the diverse, the distant, and the disregarded. Formed of the lost fragments of urban life that she rescues before their inevitable disappearance – remnants of a building’s outer walls, scraps of wallpaper from an interior, the remains of antique tiles – these often silent, ignored objects are here transformed from the mundane, and framed to acknowledge the immensity of the intimate. Furthermore, while developing projects related to the issues of redevelopment, Yang keeps an interest in what the original senses of human beings might be like within the rapid changes of a city. The speed of city life runs much faster than that of the human body, thus enforcing its speed on the people living in that city. This situation, maybe even a violent one, may damage delicate aspects of the human senses. Yang is not only concerned with the material elements that make up our cities and about those living there, she also devotes herself to the details of natural systems, which unfold in urban space, yet remain invisible.