Jongwan Jang (b. 1983) reassembles and anthropomorphizes images of nature collected from various media to create surreal landscapes and scenes. Resembling fairy tales, fables, or meticulously rendered religious paintings, his works feel surreal yet prompt reflection on the ways we believe, our psychological states, and the values we hold in our everyday reality.

Humanity has long yearned for salvation, envisioning utopias or paradises to fill its sense of anxiety and emptiness. Until the Renaissance, people expressed their imagined "heavens" through visual art, spreading visions of a promised paradise after death. With the advent of modern society, the belief shifted—many began to expect that industrialization, achieved by human hands, might lead to a utopian future.
 
However, in an anthropocentric world that prizes self-serving rationality, modern humanity remains trapped in a cycle of persistent anxiety and emptiness. Jongwan Jang turns his attention to this very condition in his paintings.

Jang’s early ‘Eden’ series features archetypal paradise scenes, composed of expansive skies, mountains, and land in the background, with humans and animals situated within the landscape. These scenes often include man-made gardens, bonsai trees, and hybrid animals—unnatural yet idealized elements intentionally placed to evoke a sense of discomfort within perfection. The artist explains that his aim was to depict a landscape so ideal that it becomes unsettling.
 
The sources of these landscapes and situations are diverse. Jang constructs his compositions using images extracted from religious propaganda materials, political posters, and calendar illustrations. What these references have in common is their ability to evoke a sense of dissonance—at once familiar and strangely disconnected from reality, prompting skepticism in the viewer.

Jongwan Jang focuses on the discomfort that arises from images of paradise—scenes that excessively idealize the present and future, masking anxiety with overwhelmingly positive and beautiful imagery. By adopting the typical compositions and motifs of highly idealized and biased imagery, he paradoxically reveals a future filled with unease. In doing so, he questions whether an ideal society, often likened to heaven, is truly attainable.

This artistic intention is deeply rooted in Jang’s personal experiences growing up in Ulsan, South Korea, where he spent most of his childhood. Known for housing the world’s largest shipyard, massive automobile factories, and sprawling petrochemical complexes, Ulsan offered material abundance through corporate salaries and welfare systems. Yet beneath this prosperity lay a strange and unsettling landscape—one marked by idolization of corporate leaders reminiscent of socialist regimes, and labor protests that felt almost like war.
 
Jang focuses on how these memories and scenes from Ulsan are not merely remnants of the past but are still echoed in various parts of the world today. Through this lens, he reimagines paradise as a bizarre new world—a surreal reflection of a supposedly ideal society.

In his later ‘Eden’ series, the artist began depicting foods commonly associated with health benefits, such as mushrooms, broccoli, ginseng, and milk thistle. By anthropomorphizing these plants, he sought to allegorically portray landscapes shaped by humanity’s blind faith in eternal life and beauty.

In his 2017 solo exhibition 《Organic Farm》 at Arario Gallery, Jongwan Jang transferred his visions of paradise onto animal hides. These peaceful, idyllic landscapes—painted over the remnants of death—paradoxically expose the cruelty hidden beneath a human-centered society.
 
In the early stages of his ‘Leather Painting’ series, the works were created with a sense of mourning, as the artist imagined questions like: “Before it died, didn’t the animal—the original owner of this hide—once run freely in a good place? And after death, did it go somewhere better?” These reflections guided his paintings with empathy and reverence for the life that once was.

Although Jang’s work seeks to mourn animals sacrificed by human greed and to expose the darker sides of human society, the use of animal death as a material is not free from moral dilemma. Aware of this ethical tension, Jang initially used hides owned by his father. Later, he began using synthetic leather or leftover scraps from leather factories, which he sometimes reshaped into the forms of animals.

His paintings evoke the texture of animal hide and fur, as well as the image of the animals when they were alive, vividly conveying both their presence and the cruelty inflicted upon them by human selfishness. Although we are often desensitized to guilt when animal skins are transformed into clothing, shoes, or bags, his work reintroduces these materials in a visual and tactile form that forces us to confront the uncomfortable realities we so easily overlook.

In his 2020 solo exhibition 《Prompter》 at Arario Museum In Space, Jongwan Jang transformed the exhibition space into a stage resembling a podium, immersing visitors in an atmosphere akin to the setting of international political discourse.
 
The exhibition originated from the artist’s experience of witnessing scenes that, while superficially just, were marked by intense scheming over vested interests—an experience that felt deeply theatrical. In particular, Jang was struck by the carefully arranged paintings, sculptures, and objects in negotiation rooms and other political venues, which contributed to this sense of staged performance.

The paintings and objects that decorate presidential offices, parliaments, and conference rooms around the world all reflect the authority of their leaders and the ideologies their countries uphold. Like a “prompter” discreetly positioned at the side of a theater stage, these symbols do not reveal their meaning overtly but function as political signifiers.
 
In response, Jongwan Jang curated the exhibition to suggest that political spaces, stripped of their overt intentions, are essentially well-designed theatrical stages. Rather than aiming for satire, the artist focused on the mise-en-scène of these environments—the way it dramatizes politicians and negotiations, lending them an aura—and approached the subject purely from an artistic perspective.

In his 2023 solo exhibition 《GOLDILOCKS ZONE》 at FOUNDRY SEOUL, the artist extends his ongoing interest in landscape to the universe, combining agriculture and futurism with concepts such as evolution and enhancement.
 
In order to create a cosmic and futuristic atmosphere using common rural and pastoral imagery, the artist not only continues to invoke the motifs of flora and fauna, but also brings in new motifs such as the unique shapes of heads that refer to the flower of the western orchid.

The title of the exhibition, “GOLDILOCKS ZONE,” comes from the name of the blonde girl in the British folk tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In this story, Goldilocks wanders through the forest and enters the home of three bears. There, she happily eats a bowl of porridge that is just the right temperature and falls asleep in a bed that is just the right amount of comfort.
 
Today, ‘Goldilocks zone’ is used as an economic term for an ideal, optimal economic situation, and as an astronomical term for an area around a star that has conditions similar to those of Earth’s that allow water and life to exist.

With heads shaped like western orchids or the appearance of tiny fairies, the figures in his paintings observe animals and plants on tranquil farmhouses or harvest vegetables in paddy fields. They are strangely eye-catching, guiding the viewer into a familiar setting. The scenes in the paintings are, in the artist’s words, an imagination of the not-so-distant future, a retrospective of the idyllic landscapes of the past before global warming, and also of the present, which is composed of a combination of current global landscapes.
 
In essence, Jang’s work invites us to question whether the ‘Goldilocks Zone,’ or an ideal world that we can migrate to and live in as an alternative to Earth, has already existed in the past, exists today, or exists in the near or distant future.

In addition, the irony of combining opposing concepts is another underlying theme that permeates the exhibition. The artist builds a sci-fi beauty and evokes an uncanny sense of dread through compositions that combine multiple narratives delivered by the concepts of plants, agriculture, and green that conjure up images of safety and peace.
 
Whether it is the geometric clearance of rice farms and fields, or the breeding of flowers and fruits for ultimate beauty and flavor, Jang’s work serves as a stark reminder that agriculture is no longer idyllic and peaceful. 

Jongwan Jang captures landscapes that have been artificially altered and dominated by human greed and desire. Rather than portraying an ideal world as purely beautiful, he exposes the bizarre and twisted nature of human desire embedded within such scenery. 

His work embeds feelings of imperfection, anxiety, and fear into surreal and bizarre landscapes, revealing what lies beneath the illusion of "utopia" or "paradise." While these scenes may at first appear unfamiliar, the questions they raise are anything but—prompting us to pause and reflect on our past, present, and future.

 “Is our future even possible?”     (Jongwan Jang, from an interview with BE(ATTITUDE)) 

Jongwan Jang is currently based in Seoul after graduating from Hongik University in Seoul. His major solo exhibitions include 《Noir Mountain》 (Amado Art Space, Seoul, 2024), 《GOLDILOCKS ZONE》 (FOUNDRY SEOUL, Seoul, 2023), 《Prompter》 (Arario Museum In Space, Seoul, 2020), 《Organic Farm》 (Arario Gallery, Seoul, 2017), and 《I hear your voice》 (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2014).
 
He has also participated in various group exhibitions, including the 15th Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju, 2024), 《Coupling》 (Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), 《Tired Palm Trees》 (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2024), 《Art Lab for Earth》 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Gwacheon, 2023), 《The 22nd SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2022), 《Post Nature: Dear Nature》 (Ulsan Art Museum, Ulsan, 2022), 《Fortune Telling》 (Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, 2021), and more.  

Jang has selected for the 8th residency program at the SeMA Nanji Residency in 2014. His works are part of the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Seoul Museum of Art; Ulsan Art Museum; Arario Museum, among others.

References

• 장종완, Jongwan Jang (Artist Website)
• 노블레스, 이상한 나라의 장종완, 2023.11.24
• 비애티튜드, 뼈 있는 농담 반, 진담 반
• 리포에틱, 장종완 (Leepoetique, Jongwan Jang)
• 아트허브, 금호미술관 – [서문] 나는 네 소리를 듣는다 (Arthub, Kumho Museum of Art, [Preface] I hear your voice)
• 아라리오뮤지엄, [서문] 프롬프터 (Arario Museum, [Preface] Prompter)
• 송은, [작품 설명] 제22회 송은미술대상전 (SONGEUN, [Artwork Description] The 22nd SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition)
• 파운드리 서울, [서문] GOLDILOCKS ZONE (FOUNDARY SEOUL, [Preface] GOLDILOCKS ZONE)