Janice Yang transforms personal history into layered visual narratives, using painting to explore migration, identity and the meaning of belonging. After moving from South Korea to the United States at 14, she spent years helping her family in a sushi restaurant while holding onto her ambition to become an artist.
That lived experience now shapes her work. Yang's figurative paintings often place self-portraits inside kitchen spaces, where everyday labor meets dreamlike imagery. Floating clouds, open windows and distant landscapes create a sense of movement between memory and imagination, while salmon appear again and again as a powerful visual thread.
For Yang, salmon are more than a recurring motif. They reflect routine, endurance and the pull of return. Their annual migration from ocean to birthplace mirrors her own search for home and artistic direction. In some works, she even incorporates salmon ash alongside acrylic and oil, extending the symbolism into the material itself.
Her visual language also draws from Korean art history, including references to Ahn Gyeon and traditional scroll painting, while blending these influences with Western perspective. The result is a body of work that feels both intimate and expansive, balancing heritage, labor and aspiration.
Yang is set to continue this momentum through upcoming residencies at Gallery MOMO in Johannesburg and Lillstreet Art Center in Chicago, where she will also teach and lecture. Her practice shows how art can turn lived experience into a universal conversation about place, memory and becoming. In the future, this kind of cross-cultural storytelling may shape how contemporary art connects communities across borders.
