Che Jen

Photo by Reynard Li

It sounds like someone mixed up the script notes: an immigrant father pushes his daughter to pursue fine art as a career. Ever defiant, at one point she quits...to become an accountant.

Luckily for us, she relented.

When you ask people to describe the art of Che Jen, words like “motion” and “energy” are inevitable parts of the answer. An artist who has no website nor gallery representation, Che Jen has a career that is finally, like her paintings, about to explode.

“I feel I am getting calmer as a person because my work is getting more crazy, more involved. I put all my energy there,” she explains. Combining Eastern calligraphy and Zen brush strokes with tribal references, she paints predominantly in black, white, and grey, which allows her to fully concentrate on the lines and motion.

Mind’s Eye

The daughter of Korean immigrants, Che Jen spent the first five years of her life on a farm in Korea about two hours outside of Seoul. “A real farm, with a cow, a stinky outhouse, and dirt roads. I spent time catching crickets with my brothers.” The family eventually moved to Brooklyn, where they moved into the first three-story building Che Jen had seen in her life. She was given an Americanized name, Jenny, in her melting-pot elementary school. Soon after, Che Jen’s father pushed her to be the artist he would never become; an art therapy teacher in Korea, in the U.S. he made ends meet as a graphic designer. “He wanted one of his seven children to be a painter,” says Che Jen. “He picked me from the beginning.

“Of course I rebelled against it. I didn’t think I had the passion, talent or desire to be a painter. It was my dad’s dream, not mine.” In addition, she felt his pressuring her to become a painter isolated her from her siblings. Her brothers and sisters would be asked to do extra homework and she would be separated, outside, painting.

In 1999 Che Jen was a School of Visual Arts dropout, managing production at a streetwear firm and working as a part-time accountant. Dave Ellis, a Brooklyn-based artist and SVA acquaintance, approached her with his vision of creating a collaborative art effort called The Barnstormers. Two weeks later, Che Jen found herself in a van heading to North Carolina to paint a barn with twenty artists including Kami, Kenji Hirata, Espo, Rostarr, Mike Ming, Muki, Eben, Bluster, Guermo, and David Ellis.

Sessions

The trip changed the course of her life. She met Mike Ming, who later became the father of her son, Tenzin, and she finally found the inspiration to become a full-time artist. “I enjoyed being with the other artists,” Che Jen says. “They pushed each other. Pushed me, encouraged me. And now I’m always thinking four steps ahead, not just in the present.” She came home, quit her day job, and began to paint full-time.

Today Che Jen is still a member of the Barnstormers, and her son, Tenzin, is four. This year she will continue to develop her body of work, which she hopes to show in Asia. She feels drawn to Asia, particularly Korea, which she has yet to return to. Hoping to tap into youth culture, she explains, “I want to connect with the kids. The graf kids, the B-boys. The music. The subculture. I want to know where they get that inspiration from.”

Lately, people have been calling to purchase work. Che Jen doesn’t know how they find her, since she lacks a website and gallery representation. It’s usually been friends who collected her work; now she imagines it’s friends-of-friends following grapevine leads.

If she could, she would give her art away, as it is the process of painting that is the most rewarding aspect for her. However, she says, “I have to feed my son, and because of this I have realized the power of selling.” And so the father that pushed her into art unwittingly provided her with a spiritually-rewarding means of feeding her son. The art world at large are the lucky bystanders.