Jane Yang D’Haene creates stoneware vessels drawing upon her Korean heritage. Though descended from traditional Korean ceramic forms, such as the dal hang-ari or moon jar, D’Haene’s vessels depart from this history as she experiments with surface, form, and technique. Vivid Memories presents works exploring D’Haene’s earliest recollections, as she seeks to transform the emotional experience of memory into the physical. Through abstraction and experimentation, D’Haene creates new visions of place and self, expanding on her earliest influences and extending across her lived experience, cultural identity, and creative practice.

Since D’Haene began her career as a ceramicist in 2016, the influence of moon jars has guided her practice. These vessels, embodying simplicity and elegance, are often associated with Korean identity and historically are made from two hemispherical halves of clay joined and fired to become a single smooth porcelain vessel. This process creates minimal, ghostlike, and gracefully asymmetrical objects with a wide body and small base, giving an illusion of levitation. Although derived from these more stoic vessels, D’Haene’s moon jars are intricately textured, with active and fitful surfaces. Rather than working within the confines of the artistic tradition, she is a vanguard actively toying with the conceptual and technical possibilities of it. The surfaces of these conceptually challenging undulate, bloom, and percolate like planetary bodies, celebrating nature, the universe, the earth, and, therefore, of the artist’s beloved medium. Through the forming and cutting of clay and the often-experimental application of various glazes, the richly textured and expressively marked surfaces of D’Haene’s works also manifest as shifting perspectives and identities, as well as unearthed memories.

Flaws are the conceptual and formal core of D’Haene’s practice. These imperfections instill her work with a dynamism that complements the shifts in texture and mood she creates across the surface of each vessel. She experiments with and expands upon the transformations of form, texture and color created during the often-volatile firing process. Embracing imperfection with intention, D’Haene captures its aesthetic value to create a balance between the various opposing forces in her work. The vessels are simultaneously terrestrial and other-worldly, abstracted and functional. Each piece is edgy, spirited, and authentic, reflecting her quest for perfection—not of modulation and mastery of her fickle medium, but of expressiveness and the success of each work’s contribution to D’Haene’s ongoing fashioning of her personal identity, experience and truth.