Jane Yang-D’Haene
The Shape of Remembering
30 July — 13 September 2026
Jane Yang-D’Haene
MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY
The Shape of Remembering
By Hyeyoung Cho
The life of an artist is often a solitary one. We create for reasons that are not always easily articulated; some experiences resist language altogether. For Jane Yang-D’Haene, clay has become that language—a medium through which memory, vulnerability, and resilience are given form. Her work embodies a quiet process of healing, one that embraces emotional tenderness so profound that it borders on pain. Yet within this vulnerability lies an enduring strength: the capacity to continue, to transform suffering into creation, regardless of circumstance.
This exhibition marks a significant moment in the artist’s practice. It reflects an attempt to reconcile with the relentless demands—and perhaps the inevitability—of a life devoted to making. The studio becomes a sanctuary where lived experience is neither concealed nor illustrated but materially transformed. Each work carries a remarkable emotional resonance; its sensitivity is neither sentimental nor theatrical, but deeply human. Together, they seem to whisper gentle affirmations: Itisallright.Tomorrowisanotherday.Everyexperienceisagift.
At the heart of this exhibition lies the distinctly Korean concept of Han—a cultural and philosophical notion that defies direct translation. More than sorrow or grief, Han describes an accumulated emotional state shaped by loss, injustice, longing, and unresolved questions that accompany the human condition. Yet Han is not simply despair. It also signifies endurance, compassion, and the possibility of transcendence through lived experience. Rather than representing suffering itself, Jane Yang-D’Haene’s work reveals the quiet strength that emerges from carrying it.
Each vessel bears its own emotional presence. Some evoke joy, others melancholy, while many inhabit the subtle space between these emotional extremes. Increasingly, however, the vessel itself has ceased to function as the primary subject of the work. Instead, Jane Yang-D’Haene has moved beyond the conventional language of ceramics to investigate broader sculptural and conceptual concerns.
Jane Yang-D’Haene repositions the Korean moon jar as a critical framework through which questions of materiality, cultural memory, and sculptural ontology may be reconsidered. The moon jar is no longer treated as a historical object to be replicated, but as an evolving sculptural proposition—one in which surface, process, and material transformation mediate the dynamic relationship between embodied memory and contemporary identity.
Her works ultimately resist categorization as either vessel or sculpture, tradition or innovation, object or memory. Instead, they occupy an expanded field where material itself becomes a bearer of thought and emotion. Through clay, glaze, fracture, and form, Jane Yang-D’Haene constructs a visual language in which remembrance is not a fixed recollection of the past, but an ongoing process of becoming. The shape of memory is therefore never complete; it remains fluid, continually reshaped through the intimate dialogue between body, material, and time.
The Shape of Remembering marks a significant development in Jane Yang-D’Haene’s evolving practice, articulating an expanded practice in which material process and conceptual inquiry become mutually constitutive. Clay is approached as an active epistemic agent through which embodied memory, historical consciousness, and processes of transformation are materially articulated. In Yang-D’Haene’s practice, making exceeds the logic of representation; it becomes a sustained
inquiry into the reciprocal constitution of matter, memory, and subjectivity. The moon jar thus functions less as an icon to be preserved than as a discursive site through which questions of materiality, temporality, identity, and cultural memory are continuously negotiated.
Her practice proposes a mode of artistic production in which process is inseparable from thought and material transformation constitutes a form of critical inquiry. Rather than locating meaning in the finished object, Yang-D’Haene foregrounds the generative agency of making itself, revealing approaches as ongoing negotiations between form and indeterminacy, presence and absence, permanence and flux. TheShapeofRememberingtherefore resists any understanding of memory as the retrieval of a stable or recoverable past. Instead, memory emerges as a relational and materially contingent process, continuously enacted through the dynamic interplay between body, matter, and time. In this sense, the exhibition advances a conception of form not as the production of autonomous objects but as a performative field in which material agency and embodied perception co-produce meaning. Remembering is thus understood less as an act of representation than as an ontological condition of becoming, in which the work remains perpetually open to reinterpretation through its encounters with material, history, and the viewer.
Hyeyoung Cho
Independent Curator
Korean Commissioner-Expert Panel, Loewe Foundation Craft Prize
Curator, Material Practice Section 2026, Frieze Seoul
Yang-D’Haene in her studio
Jane Yang-D’Haene
Jane Yang-D’Haene, born in South Korea, is a distinguished ceramic artist renowned for her masterful fusion of cultural heritage and avant-garde artistry. After relocating to New York City in 1984, she honed her architectural skills at the Cooper Hewitt School of Architecture from 1988 to 1992, later refining her design expertise at a leading architectural firm.
In 2017, Yang-D’Haene embarked on her artistic journey into ceramics, quickly establishing herself as a significant force in the medium. Her work intricately engages with traditional Korean ceramic forms, using them as a foundation for bold experimentation. By integrating contemporary techniques, vibrant colors, and dynamic textures, she creates sculptural vessels that challenge the boundaries between art and design.
Since 2020, Yang-D’Haene has participated in over 50 exhibitions, marking a significant expansion of her artistic reach. The acquisition of her Moon Jar reinterpretations by the Harvard Art Museum, along with pieces acquired by the Brooklyn Museum and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, highlights her role in redefining this classic form. Yang-D’Haene’s accolades affirm her ability to bridge historical and modern narratives, inviting reflection on the evolving dialogue between tradition and innovation in contemporary art. Her work continues to resonate deeply, reflecting the importance of cultural narratives in today’s artistic landscape.
The Shape of Remembering
Artist Statement
I have often thought that memory does not return to us as a story. It comes back in fragments — a feeling, a surface, a gesture, a trace of something once known. Over time, details disappear, but certain impressions remain. What stays is not always the memory itself, but its shape.
The works in this exhibition — eight vessels and sixteen circular paintings — began as an exploration of that idea. Though different in form, they are connected through a shared language of accumulation, repetition, and trace. Together, they ask how memory is carried, how it changes over time, and how it continues to shape us long after its origins have faded.
As I worked, I found myself returning to the same questions: What am I remembering? Whose memory is this? How does memory leave a mark? I never arrived at clear answers. Instead, the questions became part of the process itself, guiding each gesture, each line, and each layer that accumulated on the surface.
The vessel has long been central to my practice. I think of it as a body — as omething that holds, contains, protects, and endures. The circular paintings extend that conversation in a different way. They suggest the moon, the body, a horizon, or a passage through time. Together, the vessels and paintings move between interior and exterior worlds: between what is held within and what remains visible on the surface.
As with all of my work, I am interested in accumulation. Marks build upon one another, sometimes obscuring what came before and sometimes revealing it. Surfaces become records of time. Nothing is completely erased. Something always remains.
For me, remembering is not an act of looking backward. It is a way of understanding how the past continues to live within the present. Memory leaves its mark quietly. It settles into the body, into habits, into gestures, into ways of seeing. Often, we carry memories that are not entirely our own — memories inherited through family, culture, loss, and love. Their origins may become blurred, but their presence remains.
These works are an attempt to give form to that experience. The vessels hold memory; the paintings trace its movement. Together, they explore the quiet persistence of what remains with us, even when we can no longer name where it began.
TheShapeofRemembering is not about what happened. It is about what remains.
- Jane Yang-D’Haene
“Through clay, glaze, fracture, and form, Jane Yang-D’Haene constructs a visual language in which remembrance is not a fixed recollection of the past, but an ongoing process of becoming. The shape of memory is therefore never complete; it remains fluid, continually reshaped through the intimate dialogue between body, material, and time.” - Hyeyoung Cho
x 19 x 20 inches
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Jane Yang-D’Haene
Born in South Korea in 1970
Lives and works in New York City
Education
1988 - 1992 Cooper Union School of Architecture
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2026 The Shape of Remembering, Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole, Wyoming Love Letter, Bienvenu
Steinberg & C Gallery, New York, New York
The Stories Between Lines, Pierre Marie Giraud, Brussels, Belgium
2025 Short Stories, Galeria Enlace, Lima, Peru
The Place That Waited, Gallery Nilaya Anthology, Mumbai, India
2024 Asia Now Art Fair, Paris, October
Beauty Lies Within, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, UK
Vivid Memories, Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole, Wyoming
In Memory of Memory, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, Florida
2023
Becoming Me Again, Galerie Italienne, Paris, France
Handle Me With Care, Bienvenu Steinberg & J, New York, New York
Earthbound, Hauser & Wirth, Southampton, New York
Remembrance, The Future Perfect, Los Angeles, California
2022 Becoming, Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Moon Jars: Contemporary Translations, Stroll Garden, Los Angeles, California
2021 Spartan gallery, Portland, Oregon
Group Exhibitions
2026 Expo Chicago, Chicago, USA
Dallas Art Fair, Dallas, USA
2025 On Vessels, Bienvenu Steinberg & C Gallery, New
York, New York
Frieze LA presented by Tina Kim Gallery, Los Angeles
Melbourne Art Fair presented by Coma Gallery, Australia
Fog Art Fair presented by Tina Kim Gallery, San Francisco
2024 Design Miami with Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, December
Harvard Art Museum, Future Minded, New Works in The Collection
The Armory Art Fair, New York, September
Art Paris Art Fair, Bienvenu Steinberg, & J
Hauser & Wirth, London, “Objects of Contemplation”
Bienvenu Steinberg & J, New York New York, “The Stone Age”
2023 Art Basel, Miami, The Future Perfect
Onna House, Easthampton, “Nature/Nurture” Galerie Italienne, Paris France, “Hand Made”
AAPIDA & FDC, New York, Upon Further Reflection
The Future Perfect, New York, “Jeong”
2022 Alison Bradley Projects, New York, “FIRE”
The Future Perfect, New York, “Moon Jars” Maud & Mabel, London, “Tsukimi, Moon Viewing” Galerie Kitsune, New York, “Haptic Memory”
Egg Collective, New York, “In All Things A Trace” Current show
2019 1000 Vases, Dubai
2018 Casacor, Miami, Florida
Public Collections
Harvard Art Museum
Brooklyn Museum
Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Sarmaya Arts Foundation
Honors/Prizes Received
2026 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize: Finalist
MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY
66
SOUTH
GLENWOOD STREET
JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING
TEL 307 733 0555
This catalog complements Jane Yang-D’Haene’s exhibition
The Shape of Remembering
Maya Frodeman Gallery
30 July - 13 September 2026
Images © Jane Yang-D’Haene, courtesy of the artist, Photography by James Lowe
© 2026 All Rights Reserved
Untitled, (detail), Stoneware, porcelain and glaze
