Janny Baek is an artist and architect born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in Queens, New York. Janny received her BFA in ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design, and worked as a sculptor in animation and toys before completing her Masters in Architecture at Harvard University, and counts her experiences in craft, pop culture, industrial design and architecture as the major influences on her current work in ceramics. After founding her firm, McMahon-Baek Architecture, in 2014, Janny returned to making sculptures and started her ceramics practice in in 2019. Janny currently lives and works in lower Manhattan with her husband and their two daughters.
I make sculptural ceramic vessels that explore the strangeness and pleasure of growth and change, as a way of asking questions of ourselves both as individuals and as a society. As a woman artist of color, immigrant, and mother, I am invested in mining the space between the familiar and the alien, and challenging dominant narratives about beauty, value, power, and knowledge. The medium of clay and the forming of objects in this context is an assertion of the physical, inefficient, and real. My pieces exist in a captured moment of transformation, or in an ambiguous state of in between, which I think is fertile ground for reflection, change, progress, and curiosity. I use colorful and vibrant forms as a joyful and hopeful entry point to contemplate our perceptions and assumptions about ourselves, our world, the future. Through my work, I advocate for the strange, uncategorized, undefined, changeable, hybrid, multiple, alien, and pleasurable.