On October 26, Bienvenu, Steinberg & J will present Handle Me with Care, a new series from South Korean-born, Brooklyn-based ceramic artist, Jane Yang-D’Haene. Rooted firmly in traditions of 달항아리 – dalhangari, or, moon jars – works in this exhibition extend from the Yang-D’Haene’s earliest recollections of the Korean landscape. Richly textured surfaces recall the mountains and seas of her homeland, and intricate glazing methods imbue each piece with its own story, or identity. Creating new visions of place and self through abstraction and experimentation to continue the artist’s work across cultures, the newest vessels featured in this exhibition push out from Yang-D’Haene’s formative interest in those places of her earliest memories, to center an even more familiar landscape: the body.

The pieces in Handle Me with Care invite viewers to think about what makes a body whole, and, beyond that, beautiful. Using the clay body of ceramic forms as a stand-in for her own, Yang-D’Haene begins most pieces with porcelain, the purest form of clay, hand-throwing on the wheel to create vessels deemed perfect in shape and form by the aesthetic and craft principles of Korean and Western traditions alike. The artist then takes these ostensibly finished pieces and begins to cut away and slice the clay, leaving open wounds. Wrapping these damaged parts in thin layers of porcelain like gauze, building up rougher clays like stoneware around the lost matter to show and accentuate their scars, Yang-D’Haene manifests the emotional and physical intensity brought on by her own recent illness, subsequent treatment, and ongoing recovery.

Assembled as a series, the final products make these narratives of becoming and healing immediately relatable. Though pieces have undergone an artistic process akin to surgery and scarification, they are undoubtedly whole and engaging in a way far beyond the clay bodies from which they began. Handle Me with Care first challenges its viewers to recognize the fullness of beauty found in the transformed body. Perfection is irrelevant, impossible, only a beginning: the power of these pieces is in the body’s vulnerability and triumph.