FIVE DIRECTIONS: VESSELS
September 30, 2022 - February 28, 2023
Five Directions: Vessels is a site specific installation by artist Julia Chon, curated by Latela Curatorial for the Conrad Washington DC.
Chon creates work across a variety of media spanning sculpture, painting and large scale murals. Her work focuses on honoring her Korean heritage and her notable portraiture aims to redefine modern Asian femininity.
Five Directions: Vessels features five kimchi pots inspired by the principles of Korean feng shui, known as pungsu-jiri. Incorporating both science and philosophy, pungsu-jiri is a practice that employs the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal and water) in an effort to find harmony within the natural world. In practice, pungsu-jiri channels energy to bring balance and luck to a space.
With Vessels, each of the five kimchi pots represents the five directions (north, east, south, west and center), each of which has a corresponding color and symbolism. Additionally, each vessel carries its own potent message for the artist. For Chon, these specific vessels represent grief, sorrow, hope, re-birth and peace. Together this assemblage presents a cyclical embodiment of some of life’s deepest experiences.
These five kimchi pots are part of a larger series, Memories of Home, that Chon aims to exhibit collectively in 2023. This series includes a collection of 52 painted kimchi pots, to represent how many years the artist’s family has lived in the United States since immigrating in 1970.
PURCHASE ARTWORK BY JULIA CHON ON artsy
Julia Chon, better known by her artist name Kimchi Juice, is a Washington DC-based artist and muralist. Chon’s work focuses on honoring her Korean heritage. Most recently, she creates Korean Earthenware sculptures representative of traditional kimchi pots. One of her first kimchi pots was acquired into the Smithsonian permanent art collection at the Anacostia Museum.
Chon’s work explores the relationship between cultural tradition and its effects on generational identity and the decisions Asian Americans make to form their identities. With a prominent Korean aesthetic in each piece, Chon merges her ancestry and traditions with the contemporary to convey the nuances of the Korean diaspora.
As Chon’s work makes its way from canvas to large-scale murals, these intimate portraits take center stage in an urban environment. Her murals can be found internationally and her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in Washington DC, Los Angeles, CA and Miami, FL. Chon’s clients and collaborations include NASA, Apple, the Korean Cultural Center, and HBO, among others.
This exhibition is one of five participating exhibitions in the Third Annual See Support Collect Initiative, which is an intersectional placemaking and gap-filling initiative that focuses on collectorship of art by women and non-binary artists. SSC takes place both on Artsy and IRL in multiple locations from October 10 - November 20, 2022.