Jin Meyerson

Jin Meyerson believes he just celebrated his 50th birthday, but he can never be sure of the date.  As one of the more 200,000 Korean children adopted from around the world—the largest adoption exodus from a single country in history—he knows the details of his birth story were likely fabricated by officials. 

“The first confirmed date I have of my existence is 1975 in Incheon, when I was abandoned in a public market and brought to a police station,” Meyerson says, noting that his May 8 birthday–Parents’ Day in Korea–is one he shares with many adoptees. “This is a very subverted point of history, and there’s been very little conversation about it inside Korea.” 

But across three decades of artistic practice, Meyerson has remained intent on starting that conversation through large-scale paintings which often explore questions of identity, distortion, and displacement. Part of the first generation of young painters to be confronted with the digital revolution, Meyerson’s work often relies on photo-editing software and augmented reality to distend and obscure documents and images, which serve as the underlayment to a painstaking, months-long painting process. “I have never wanted to make simple pieces of art,” Meyerson has said. “I think every artist starts out wanting to find out something about themselves. That’s the difference between making cute drawings and making art.”

A love of drawing was the all that Meyerson had to bring from the orphanage to rural Minnesota in 1976, where he was adopted by what he describes as a “Swedish-American mother and a Jewish intellectual father from the Bronx. We were a multicultural family before the term was invented.” Encouraged to pursue his passion for painting, he graduated from MCAD in 1995 and went on to earn an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in 1997. Though he found success early, with international gallery showings in New York, Paris, and Hong Kong, he was  burned out after a divorce and gave up painting for nearly two years to concentrate on single-parenting. “Being an artist with a market and an audience is a dream job–but it also has to be your life, because no one else is going to do the work,” he says. “I’d been doing this since my late 20s, and I was exhausted.” 

But Meyerson soon found artistic renewal through an invitation to set up a studio in Seoul. “There’s a reverence for art and culture in Korea, and generation after generation of amazing artists here,”  he says, adding that contemporary art is tax-free, and many high-end galleries pre-pay for production from their most revered artists. His renewed commitment to art also led to “meeting and marrying the love of my life. I never imagined I’d have another opportunity, and that I would have what few adoptees get–a real Korean family.”

Meyerson admits that being a major player and a cultural ambassador for Seoul’s expanding artistic scene still surprises him–particularly last year, when Max Hollein, director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art stopped by his studio for a visit. “If you had told me back in 2007 that someday the director of the Met would come to Korea, I would never have believed you, but it’s happening because Korea is a phenomenal location right now. It’s a testament to the positive things that are happening in this art community,” he says, adding that Korea has finally begun to feel like home. “I won the lottery in many ways, being able to escape Korea when I did, and being able to be here now. But I think I have gotten to the age where I really don't believe in coincidences–I believe in these sequences that we as individuals complete within our families, communities, and personal histories.’’