JIN MEYERSON: PYROKINESIS

Jin Meyerson (b. 1972 Korea) is recognized for his contributions to the revival of figurative painting in the late 90’s and as an early pioneer of “Frontier Optics”; the usage of digital and virtual source material in place of live or photographic reference. Meyerson has combined randomization software, digital distortion, image sampling, and oil painting since 1997. His electric canvases bridge figurative and abstract traditions. Originating from a dual narrative of expanding the living history of contemporary painting, which had been declared dead in the NY art world, Meyerson cites that he entered radical virtual spaces, as they relate in direct parallel to his personal history as a Korean Adoptee. This state of Utopia, from the Greek, “no place”, allowed him to reach outside of the choreographed co-opted strategies of appropriation and standardized identity art, to ultimately express acute displacement and to engage with issues of subverted history, post-colonialism and diaspora. Meyerson’s early work made in NYC, relied on a process of ‘handing over’ scans of glossy American popular culture into randomization programs where highly distorted versions of the original images would be reflected back through critical and celebratory paintings. Irrevocably linked to the places he has lived and worked, Incheon, Minneapolis, New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Jakarta and finally Seoul, in effect, Meyerson’s paintings act as locational demarcations in geographies of time and space.

In 2018, after returning to Korea for a second time, Meyerson began a body of work that departed from the far ranging cultural points of reference that defined his work in the NYC-Paris-Hong Kong years. He turned his gaze inwards creating generative paintings through the self-sampling of his own work. This lead to a sequence of autobiographical abstractions and expanded Meyerson’s practice into Augmented Reality overlays which feature the birth records / raw data sketches of his paintings, LIDR scans which are the basis for figurative paintings that are drawn from the artists personal loss of any connection to his birth mother and utilize parapsychological Séance rituals and finally paintings which are sourced from videos that employ the concept of retro-causality and predict the future of his existing paintings. For Meyerson, Pyrokinesis; the ability to create and control fire with the mind, becomes possible through predictive consequence and is his latest offering, reaching directly into the artists longstanding fascination with thermal considerations of color over luminescence and the ever increasing environmental crises of globalized forest fires.