JIN MEYERSON

Born in Incheon City, Korea, in 1972, Meyerson was adopted by a Jewish-Swedish couple from rural Minnesota at four years of age and raised in the Midwest. He received his BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1995 and graduated with an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts two years later.

In the painting Broadacre (2013–14), Meyerson depicts a densely populated street in a chaotic, dystopian Hong Kong, its buildings stacked on top of each other and overgrown mossy tree branches wedged between them. The megalopolis featured again as an inspiration for the paintings in his solo show No Rest for the Wicked at Perrotin, Hong Kong, in 2013, including Untitled (Four Seasons) (2013) which features dishevelled hotel room sheets from his sleepless first night in the city.

Central Connection (2014), The Air We Breathe (2015) and Japantown (2016) are all psychedelic images of expansive industrial landscapes. Their impossibly curved metal walkways and factory pipes are created by Meyerson’s highly physical method of production, in which he takes his source images and stretches, layers, or recolours them using a computer or manually twists and scans them. Meyerson then recreates the dizzying, marbled effects in oil on canvas, producing complex multi-dimensional pieces that breathe life into our crowded modern cities.

In 2004, Meyerson held his first solo show—More than You Want, Less than You Need—at New York’s LFL Gallery. He moved to Paris two years later and lived there until 2010, at which time he traveled to Changdong, Seoul, for a residency sponsored by the National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea. Since then, Meyerson has been based in various areas of Asia and has featured the region’s cities and their relentless pace and impressive architecture throughout his work.

Meyerson’s work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; Saatchi Gallery, London; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels; Dean Valentine, Los Angeles; Jerry Speyer Family Collection, New York; Yuz Foundation, Jakarta; and the Taguchi Art Collection, Japan. Selected solo shows include Accidental Tourist, Perrotin, Paris (2006); Progress is No Longer a Guarantee, Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin (2007); Rare Earth, Yuz Foundation, Jakarta (2011); Endless Frontier 2, Hakgojae Gallery, Shanghai (2014); Nowadays, nca | nichido contemporary art, Tokyo (2015); and A Nexus of Art and Architecture, 520 West 28^th, New York (2017).

Genista Jurgens | Ocula | 2018