Subtitled NYC Is Carving Out a Third Path for New York’s Artists
Observer · · g5128581
The gallery launched as a practical way for artist Jaejoon Jang to afford studio space and share work he admired. It has grown into one of Brooklyn’s most adventurous independent spaces.
Museums move on their own inscrutable timelines, and the road to commercial recognition is long and narrow enough that many otherwise talented artists find themselves looking for some nebulous third path. And when they don’t immediately find it, many do what artists do and carve it out for themselves, acting as curators, dealers, directors and publicists. Put another way, artist-led spaces usually start as a response to what galleries and museums won’t, or can’t, do—namely, host site-specific installation and experimental work by talent that isn’t yet what the market would deem “emerging.”
Subtitled NYC in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is one such space, and Jaejoon Jang is one such gallerist. The four-year-old artist-run gallery in New York was founded by the Korean-born artist after he completed his MFA at MICA in Baltimore in 2019. “The pandemic happened, and I had this unexpected pause for one or two years during which I couldn’t really start my career as an artist in a serious way,” he tells Observer. “But I still wanted to do something related to art.” He knew he needed a studio and he’d need to cover rent and material costs, and after running the numbers, he realized that inviting other creatives made financial sense. “I also just wanted to introduce the artists I really liked to the people around me.”
Jang had no formal curatorial training and no prior gallery experience when he opened Subtitled NYC. The early shows were modest—small paintings, small sculptures, placed with care but without any specific ambition. His instinct, in both art and life, he explains, is to start fast and correct as he goes. And he quickly realized he would have to pay more attention to what the artists he was working with actually needed.
He noticed that young and emerging artists in New York were routinely expected to pay for the privilege of showing: delivery fees, application fees, material costs. He thought that was strange, and he started covering those costs himself. “The more shows I did, the more I wanted to give the artists freedom,” he says. “I realized how important it was to support them because that’s another way of investing in an exhibition. The more I can support the artist and the exhibition, the better the shows turn out.”
The name Subtitled emerged as spontaneously as the space’s program. While conducting research into the feasibility of the project, Jang happened to label a folder ‘Subtitled’—and the name stuck. “As an immigrant artist in New York, it resonates,” he says. “Even after 10 years in the United States, I still watch films and videos with subtitles. I don’t want to have only immigrant artists showing at the gallery—I want to have more diversity—but “subtitled” is a good fit because in New York there are so many different kinds of people.”
The guiding principle at Subtitled NYC is flexibility. Jang imposes few constraints on scale, medium or even sellability. He’s particularly interested in showing experimental and installation-based work that more established galleries tend to avoid because it doesn’t fit the standard white cube format. “I don’t want to say I’m different from other spaces, because that sounds like I’m saying I’m better, and I don’t think that’s it,” he reflects. “But I’m doing something a little bit alternative, something other spaces can’t easily do… experimental, unconventional work, especially installation, sound and things like that. I want to show more of that.”
In the years since Subtitled’s opening, several artists Jang has long admired have shown in the space. He was also able to invite Siobhan Liddell, who had been something like a mentor to him at MICA—they hadn’t seen each other in six years, and the show brought them back together. “Those have been genuinely important moments for me,” he says.
Subtitled NYC’s current show, “ Sky Blue ,” featuring selected works by Louis Block, Spencer Finch, Byron Kim and Motohiro Takeda, feels fairly traditional in terms of layout, but past exhibitions have pushed the envelope. “ On Other Terms ,” which closed in spring and had work by Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré curated by Ho Won Kim , turned the space into something of a maze, with an immersive environment of crisscrossing wood beams, metal and string paired with sculpture and textile works. “ The Other Internet ,” a solo exhibition by Yehwan Song curated by Brian Droitcour , had water spurting over phone screens in a looming angular scaffolding. On tap are two dual-artist presentations—one with Michaela Bathrick and Soyoung Chung in November and one with Connor McNicholas and Gijeong Goo in December.
Jang gives artists a month, sometimes more, to install, and the generosity of the timeline is something he is happy to be able to provide: “Most artists in New York, even those with good careers, have other jobs. They’re working elsewhere and have to commute there and here to the gallery. I don’t want to tell them to just focus on the install and finish in three days. I try to give them a long runway.”
He doesn’t call what he’s doing at Subtitled NYC a residency because he wants to stay focused on the exhibition itself rather than the process of its creation. And he says he’s not interested in growing into an institution, because he feels like funders “would interrupt or interfere too much with my practice.” He has even turned down grant offers because the organizations attached conditions he didn’t want to meet, like upfront proof of programming: “I don’t want to limit too much—not just in running the artist space, but I don’t want to limit the budget, and I don’t want to limit which artists have exhibitions, even if their work is very experimental, installation-based, site-specific, maybe hard to sell.”
Asked to describe his vision for the future of the space, Jang answers that his goal is to keep doing exactly what he’s doing for at least another 10 years. What he finds most gratifying is watching an artist who showed at Subtitled NYC go on to show somewhere bigger. “I want to stay a little more amateur,” he says. “I don’t want too much pressure. I really like this situation, and I want to keep it going.”
That said, he admits he’s open to change. “That’s my answer for right now,” he hedges, “but it could be different tomorrow.”