Jeffrey Yuan of Plainsboro has his first solo show, “Under a Quiet Heaven,” at Gallery 14 in Hopewell opening on Friday, March 20, with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. There is also a meet the photographers event on Sunday, March 22, from 1 to 3 p.m.
Last summer Yuan was one of the featured photographers in the alternative photography exhibit at Princeton Alliance Church’s Art Way Gallery featuring historical photographic methods still in use today. Yuan, who has been a Plainsboro resident for 10 years, lives with his wife, Michele Minter, director of development at Princeton University. Their son is a freshman at North, and their daughter is a fourth grade student at Community Middle School.
Yuan, who has his bachelor’s degree from Yale University, and his doctorate in molecular biology from Rockefeller University, did a post doctorate at Princeton University. A regulatory scientist who works for the pharmaceutical company Merck, he oversees development, writes applications, and represents Merck to the Food and Drug Administration for new drugs. “Work is a nice contrast to my hobby,” he says.
Having grown up in a household surrounded by classical Chinese landscape paintings by his grandfather, Yuan An-Pu, Jeff found these paintings of a serene, idealized alternate world to be inspiration for his own photography. “Photography has always represented the intersection of the esthetic and the technical,” he says. “Trained as a molecular biologist, I seek to understand the unknown. In many ways, photography inverts my training, requiring me to compose reality into an interpreted alternative vision.”
In the series of images titled “Under a Quiet Heaven,” he captures images from central New Jersey as well as more distant locales including the ponds and shores of Martha’s Vineyard, the marshes of the Sea Islands of Georgia, and a construction site near Toronto, Canada. The use of a limited color palette or black and white is in keeping with the aesthetic traditions of classical Chinese landscape painting where color is used sparingly or not at all.
To create these images, Yuan prints most of his images on handmade cotton rag paper using the 19th century technique of palladium printing. “It is a marriage of 19th and 20th century processes using the best of both worlds,” says Yuan, who learned palladium through reading books. He has a room in the house with black light bulbs — not a dark room, and develops film using a changing bag.
Yuan, who uses both digital and film cameras, has been interested in photography his whole life, but became serious about four years ago. During college he studied Chinese art history under the tutelage of Richard Barnhart, and more recently, he has studied photography under the direction of Robert Blake at the International Center of Photography and privately with Ernestine Ruben.
Yuan’s process, viewable at www.jyuanimages.info, includes large format pictures, creating and printing negatives, scanning the image into a computer, and using an ink jet printer. “Washing the image gives me the tonality that I like,” says Yuan, who also uses hand made paper. “Every print is hand-crafted and each one is different.” — Lynn Miller
Art Exhibit, Gallery 14, 14 Mercer Street, Hopewell. Friday, March 20, 6 to 9 p.m. Opening reception for “Etudes” featuring the works of Tasha O’Neill and “Under a Quiet Heaven” by Jeffrey Yuan. In the small gallery is “Fruit/Cakes” by Martha Weintraub and Rhoda Kassof-Isaac. Through April 19. Meet the photographers on Sunday, March 22, 1 to 3 p.m. 609-333-8511. www.photosgallery14.com.
