Janice Chung is a Korean-American artist, born and bred in New York City. The daughter of two immigrant deli-owners of Queens, Chung was heavily influenced by her parents’ Confucian values in a reserved low-income household. As Chung entered her twenties, she began to unveil the tensions within her family using her camera to gaze into the unspoken. Today, Chung continues to work in the confines of the Korean-American community and also photographs her family both in New York City as well as in Seoul, Korea. Through her photography, she aims to shed light on the stigma of broken families in the Asian American/Asian community through an intimate peek inside a Korean-American/Korean home. Chung earned her BFA in photography at the School of Visual Arts and currently resides and works in New York City.
Please Come Back Soon
In the body of work titled “Please Come Back Soon”, New York native Janice Chung explores Seoul, Korea for the first time following her mother, Seung Sin, to reconnect with their family. The intimate scenes are often taken in her grandmother’s apartment in Anyang, South Korea. During the two month trip, Chung, with her mother and grandparents, would travel and explore intimate parts of the city of her mother’s childhood. In the photos, Chung captures the tensions that unravel as her mother begins to make up lost time with her family, after 10 years of distance and 30 years of untold memories. The series explores the challenges of a woman who is displaced from her family and the brevity of life.
To view more of their work please visit their website.