Taiwanese-American artist and illustrator James Jean just finished this beautiful mural for the Taiwanese edition of the POW! WOW! Festival.
Born in Taiwan but brought up in New Jersey, Jean went through the School of Visual Arts in NYC before becoming a cover artist for DC comics.His illustration clients include Time Magazine, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, ESPN, Atlantic Records and Prada amongst many others and has an impressive list of awards behind.
His work is very diverse, going from everything from outlined comic work (like the one we see here) to semi abstract and even Jackson Pollock-ish paintings.
The new mural was painted at the Taipei Zoo using housepaint, lacquer, spraypaint, and oil on concrete. The artist explains the piece as follows:
The broken letter forms spell out “Heaven” but also represent my fragmented memory of mandarin. I’m not sure why I was so resistant to learning Chinese as a kid… guess I was a bad monkey. – James Jean
Lovely work.
images by bshigeta via the artist and the festival
Author: Fran
Founder and editor of Urbanite. Street Art lover who after the finishing her MA thesis on the Mexican and Norwegian muralist movement in the 1920-50s, developed a fascination for street art and graffiti that eventually led to collaborations with different art blogs, including the creation of this one.
