19 March - 12 April 2025

front gallery

Jake Yang
His embrace

Statement 

His embrace celebrates moments of intimacy and shared memories between two lovers drawing on the sacredness of giving your heart to someone you love. Through figurative painting and sculptural elements, I hope for viewers to connect ideas of nurture and the embrace through this queer lens.

This exhibition is inspired by the formation of a long-distance relationship I witnessed between friends in my inner circle. Through this voyeuristic lens of romance and detachment I want to explore the presence and absence of love and how this is physically communicated through touch, embrace and environment. This process of caring for a heartbroken friend has offered myself an opportunity to re- examine how we portray certain emotions when circumstances are futile.

After reflection upon my own queer relationships, I became heavily influenced by my friends where this universal feeling of heart-ache and pain lies. I wanted to focus on the soft moments of happiness and safety in acts of embrace to confront the themes and reality of loss and separation. I explore these periods through my oil paintings, pushing the boundaries of visual framework in my contemporary and experimental integrations of sculpture installation. I also explore the concept of sacred memories through scale shifts in pieces and application of oil paint with consideration to background and framing devices.

As young queer people we often neglect our true identity, so forming special bonds and relationships where we feel most safe and ourselves is something that I think needs to be represented and celebrated. Being a young queer individual exploring new ways to express these ideas is a way for me to make sense of the world around us and how loves embracecan make the heart grow fonder.

Artist Bio

Jake Yang is a recent graduate of Adelaide Central School of Art, Kaurna Land, Adelaide. He explores various disciplines, notably painting, sculpture, textiles, and installation.

Yang’s art practice explores queer youth culture and the way it sits alongside and intersects with his cultural background, raised in a conservative traditional Chinese culture.

In Yang’s work privacy, intimacy, care, and freedom are celebrated in lush, safe natural environments. He challenges the normative assumptions through an examination of intersecting identities and existing in three very different cultures simultaneously (Chinese, Australian and queer).

His practice explores internal conflict, a sense of fracture as well as the longing for cross- sacredness and celebration of safe spaces. Yang’s painting practice is influenced by traditional Chinese cultural artefacts and techniques as a means of connecting back to his neglected cultural identity growing up.

Exploring queer culture and personal relationships in art is a practice of empowerment, self- development and self-acceptance.