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AVAfest fall 2022 featuring Jae Kwon

A Virtual Exhibit in collaboration with Asian American Resource Center and Austin verteran arts festival 2022.

Left: sandbags | Jae Kwon | February, 2022 | Digital Right: graduation | Jae Kwon | February, 2022 | Digital
water bottle | Jae Kwon | February, 2022 | Digital
self portrait | Jae Kwon | May, 2021 | Graphite on paper
all clear | Jae Kwon | October, 2022 | Digital
am i tough enough | Jae Kwon | September, 2022 | Digital
siblings | Jae Kwon | October, 2022 | Digital
onward | Jae Kwon | August, 2021 | Digital

ARTIST STATEMENT

I dug through my old photos and used the selection as a reference. Central to the set is my first deployment to Iraq. Peripherally, my youth and post-military.

The reference photos from the deployment: I selected the ones that give an air of acceptance in the grind. Perhaps that is my general attitude to living. I chose them not to glamourize some of the worst times in life but to include the excluded. Is it outside the realm of comprehension that an Asian person would serve in combat, let alone in the U.S. military? It is a statement: I was there; I did what I did, saw what I saw, smelled what I smelled, felt what I felt, all of its good and evil, along with everyone else.

The other drawings are snapshots in life that somehow speak to, in its interaction with my military past, the way I perceive the self today. Also, I included my only (so far) 6-panel comic I created following a how-to workshop in 2021 hopefully to demonstrate the freeing power of creating art.

The subject is important in making my military experience intelligible to me. What meaning can I derive from it? How does it fit into my life narrative? What is the connection between it and my other life-defining moments, such as immigration, career transitions, and marriage? Where do I go from here?

Within each of the referenced photos lie stories small and large, trying circumstances, shame and guilt, grief, happiness, and all else that constitute an important part of who I am, which, in the day to day, are forgotten or ignored. Through the act of drawing and by examining what remains – the sum of all the lines, shapes, colors, mood, negative and positive spaces, and subjects and their expressions - and all that which I have excluded, I seek to find footing in this ever-changing world, which perhaps is a mere projection of ever-changing self.

About the Artist

Jae Kwon ( 권재연) was born in 1985 in Ulsan, Korea. He immigrated to U.S. - the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland - at age 10. Upon graduating high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a Hospital Corpsman. The early part of his naval career was marked by two combat deployments to Iraq, in a Marine infantry unit. Following the end of his service in 2015 Jae found a home and a community in Austin, Texas. At the onset of the pandemic, he leaned into his teenage penchant for drawing. He has since continued to draw as a means to build a new connection between his past and present.

Image Source: Jae Kwon