CREATIVE SPARKS
Creative people, from artists to entrepreneurs, map the journey that shaped their careers. Mimi Jung is a Korean designer based in Los Angeles. She shares her story, including her take on the concept of opportunity, and talks about her work for Broached Commissions, on display at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia.
I attended the School of Art at The Cooper Union and HGK Basel for communication design. After my studies and a few years of working in graphic design studios, I took a workshop on floor-loom weaving out of sheer desperation for creative satisfaction. At first I found certain elements of the medium restricting but, after abandoning most of my workshop lessons and holding on to the fundamentals of weaving, I developed an artistic language that ceases to have limits.
I’m currently experiencing a wider acceptance of my work, which allows me to continue exploring and challenging myself with each commission, exhibition and collaboration. Every time I find myself at a creative crossroads it feels momentous. It is a privilege that I don’t take lightly.
There wasn’t a single watershed moment for me, but rather a slow and long progression. I knew even as a child that opportunities are not for the passive and it was up to me to seek them out and to grab them with both hands. This is a very simple concept but can only be embedded in a young child facing unorthodox circumstances. My childhood and teenage years were about survival: I could only respond to what was in the foreground. My twenties focused on exploring every creative passion in the hope of becoming an artist. Now, in my thirties, I am settling into an artistic practice, inviting challenges and navigating my career.
Lou Weis, creative director of Broached Commissions, first approached me about a separate collaboration, and although it didn’t ultimately come to fruition, our talks brought to light Broached’s unique process for supporting and producing work. Not wanting to pass up the opportunity for this partnership, grounded in a genuine love of art and design, I pitched
my idea for a project with Broached to Lou. Lou and I had a dialogue that went on for eighteen months, mainly touching on my personal experiences with migrating and living on my own at age thirteen. It was an organic cultivation of information that felt like a conversation between friends. About half way into our ongoing dialogue, I became a foster mother
to a four-year-old girl. It was an exceptionally challenging and introspective time. This journey added another perspective on displacement through drastically different circumstances. Every pivotal point in my life was documented through this dialogue and is reflected in this new work.
My work for Broached Commissions draws on displacement and the idea of space in between. Any kind of displacement has a profound effect on a person. It takes the sense of belonging, a basic necessity in life, out of
the equation. Displacement produces gaps in development, which trigger an altered response to every new experience thereafter. It is a
ripple effect that never ends. However, these developmental gaps should not be perceived as an absence, but a source.
A focus on the space in between is evident in all my work. A void can be more powerful than any form – it influences everything around it. With the help of an LA kiln-formed glass fabricator, Judson Studios, each layer of glass was cast from one of my original weavings, creating a unique surface each time. The cast glass sheets were cut into strips, then stacked on top of each other and fired again, resulting in cavities. Each cavity forces the layer above it to shift, creating areas of fused sheets of glass and spacing in between.
My work Fallen Fence (pictured) is an evolutionary step, sitting between my more two dimensional weavings and the sculptural glass forms. In many ways the curves and slumps of this work inspired the glass collection.
This collection is a new expression of the creative preoccupations that guide my woven work. I wanted to work in a new material, and the partnership with Broached Commissions opened up space for this to happen, both in terms of creative dialogue and financing of the project.
DESIGN STORYTELLERS: THE WORK OF BROACHED COMMISSIONS IS ON DISPLAY AT THE IAN POTTER CENTRE: NGV AUSTRALIA UNTIL FEBRUARY 2019.
