Artist Talk with Nayeon Yang: Inverse Proportion: Art As (not) Labor
@ NEIU Fine Art Center Gallery
5500 N St. Louis Ave, Building E, Chicago, IL 60625
Opening Wednesday, October 9th, from 3PM - 4PM
On view through Friday, October 25th
Artist Talk will be hosting in NEIU’s Fine Art Center Building Room 112 at 3pm on October 9th.
“Inverse Proportion: Art as (not) Labor” is “… a project to realize art practice as practical ”work.” I want to discuss the inherited social framework that fails to recognize artists’ labor and their rights to get paid for it.
As I study the relations of labor and capital, it is natural to question the odd equation: Artists’ finite resources, such as physical and emotional energy + time + money ÷ art = living condition. The more I work on art, the more destitute I get.
‘To survive as an artist, you need a wealthy partner.’ This was a joke from an established artist at her talk when I was a student 10 years ago. Recalling this joke now, I cannot laugh even slightly. It is still too close to reality, like when I heard ‘To survive as a woman, you’d need to meet a rich man’ in my childhood. I am still in a society where I cannot be independent and where I need to rely on someone’s ”generous” support, even though I work more than 60 hours (art+day jobs) a week. In this sense, the artists’ labor is similar to women’s household labor and caregiver’s labor, which are not recognized as valuable ”labor” in a patriarchal society; artists’ resources, such as their labor, time, and money they earn from day jobs, are too often taken for free to feed the art industry. I want a society where a joke like ‘meet a rich partner’ doesn’t need to descend to the next generation.”
Artist Bio
Nayeon Yang is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago and South Korea. She moved to the U.S. from South Korea in 2006. Experiencing the implied status of a ‘foreigner’ now in both countries, she explores the politics of ‘foreign’ and ‘presence’ in a global society through her projects. Yang has exhibited at different venues including Chicago Artists Coalition, Wedge Projects, Roots and Culture, Co-Prosperity Sphere, Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, 849 Gallery at the Kentucky College of Art and Design, Roy G. Biv Gallery, Suchang Youth Mansion, and Mythtake Museum. She received an MFA in Sculpture from the Ohio State University and a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is an alumna of residencies such as High Concept Labs, Birdsell Project, ACRE, Wassaic Project, and others.
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