Jun Yang 준양

Jun Yang 준양 (he/they) is a queer Korean multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco, working across painting, soft sculpture, ceramics, and installation. Rooted in his experience of migration and queer immigrant identity, Jun's practice transforms grief and trauma into tactile, participatory work that invites viewers to physically engage with healing and belonging. Blending traditional Korean motifs like Minhwa folk painting and Dancheong color palettes with contemporary materials such as Apoxy clay, textiles, and industrial hardware, Yang builds immersive spaces of care for queer and immigrant communities. His work has been exhibited at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum, the de Young Museum, Marin MOCA, and Kunsthaus Graz, among others, and he is a two-time recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission Visual Arts Grant.

As a multidisciplinary artist, your work encompasses a variety of media, but your painterly marks seem to be prominent in all of the different end products. Do you consider yourself a painter working in multiple media, or an artist (in general) working in these different forms of expression?

I think of myself as a painter at my core, even when the final piece isn't technically a painting. Painting is where my process starts, how I think through color, shapes, line drawings and depth before anything else happens. Even in my soft sculpture and ceramic work, I paint the layered color, the intuitive mark-making, the way I build surfaces the same way I'd build up paint on canvas. When I move into fabric or clay, I'm not abandoning painting, I'm extending it into a tactile form you can touch and hold. So while I'm comfortable calling myself a multidisciplinary artist, if I had to choose one identity underneath all of it, it would be painter. Every other medium is just an extension of that core instinct.

The use of color in your work immediately draws in the viewer. Do any ideas or principles guide your color choice? Is it intuitive? Or is it a combination?

It's mostly pure intuition. I don't sit down with a color plan or follow formal rules; I respond to what I feel in the moment, and what the piece needs emotionally. Color is how I locate grief, memory, or joy on the canvas before I fully understand what I'm painting. That intuition gets fed by being out in the world. Travel and new environments shape my palette directly. During my residency in Mexico City, seeing the art, museums, and exhibitions there completely shifted how I see color, opening me up to earthier, more vibrant tones I hadn't worked with before.

Lately I've been simplifying my palette, leaning into warm, human tones and letting colors bleed into each other with soft, blurred edges rather than hard lines. Unlearning formal color theory was actually essential to this; it let me paint color the way it actually feels in my body, not the way I was taught it should look.So it's the places and the experiences that feed me. The canvas itself is where intuition takes the wheel.

Are there any artists or art movements that inspire your work, in addition to your own personal history and identity?

Traditional Korean art movements have shaped me as much as any individual artist, particularly Minhwa folk painting, Sansoowa landscape painting, and Dancheong. I return to these historical forms and rework them through a contemporary, queer lens, which feels less like referencing the past and more like continuing a conversation with it.

I'm also deeply inspired by Lee Bul, sculptural, often tactile and beaded forms from her early cyborg works to her recent facade commission at the Metropolitan Museum combine conceptual rigor with a real physicality I aspire to in my own soft sculpture.

Do Ho Suh's work has influenced me too, especially Home Within Home, his fabric houses suspended in Incheon Airport. His idea that home isn't a fixed geography, that it's something you carry and rebuild wherever you land, speaks directly to my own experience living outside Korea.

And earlier this year I saw Chiharu Shiota's Two Home Countries at the Asian Art Museum here in San Francisco, her red thread work translating memory and in-betweenness into something you could physically walk through. That kind of emotional cartography, thread as a way of mapping loss and connection, is something I think about constantly in my own stitching. What happens when you approach art like a scientific experiment, poetry like an act of observation, and a crumpled piece of packaging paper as a collaborator? 

For more information about Jun Yang and their work, visit his website or follow them on Instagram.