Jason Yung
about
Jason Yung was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. Art is his second career. Before art, Yung worked in international relations, mostly as a Canadian diplomat. He found his calling as an artist after serving in Afghanistan in 2010-11. In 2015, Yung re-located to New York City to study at the Arts Students League of New York. He was educated in painting, drawing and sculpture but noted a divide between the classical and contemporary art worlds. In early 2016, Yung took a course called “Electronics for artists” and found his way with new media art. In October 2016, in his Brooklyn loft, Yung staged his first interactive installation using sensors and LEDs. Entitled Archetypal Encounters, it brought to life key concepts in the psychology of Carl Jung, something that Yung has studied extensively. During this experience Yung learned to work with LEDs and discovered its possibilities as its own artistic medium. He saw that using projected light from an LED allowed an artist to create forms and images through mixing light on a surface like a painter mixed paint on a canvas. In this way, Yung works to connect classical visual logic with cutting edge technology. In summer 2017, Yung staged a series of public pop-up shows entitled Bushwick Lightbox, where he showed different patterns of his 24 x 48” LED projection in different areas of Bushwick, Brooklyn and Washington Square Park in Manhattan. In autumn 2017, Yung began grad school at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Known as an “engineering school for artists”, it lies at the heart of the intersection between technology and art.
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This piece is a light painting. It uses LED light to create form in the same way a painter uses oil. It utilizes all the same visual laws of painting — however, light has it’s own unique properties. It is often said that colour is the most relative thing in art. When working with light, this is even more so the case as projected light acts upon the human eye in a more direct way than reflected light. My work draws upon my major influences — the light artists and geometric abstract painters of the the 20th century: Albers, Rothko, Turrell.