Between two tigers: Janice Chae on building a career across Korea and Singapore

Represented by one gallery in Korea and still introducing herself to collectors in Singapore, Janice Chae is at the stage every serious collector should be watching most closely — the point where an artist’s pricing, symbolism and international identity are all still being written in real time, not yet fixed by consensus.

A career still visible from the inside

There is a particular moment in an artist’s trajectory that collectors talk about constantly but rarely get to observe directly: the stage where the work is gaining real traction, but the artist is still personally involved in almost every part of running the practice. Janice Chae describes being in exactly that window right now. Represented by Gallery T in Korea, where her collector base and exhibition history are established, she is simultaneously introducing herself to Singapore from closer to the ground — painting in her home studio one day, negotiating a brand collaboration the next, answering a collector’s message directly the day after that.

“There is still a great deal of building happening behind the scenes,” she says. It’s an unusually candid admission from an artist at a growth stage most galleries prefer to present as already resolved — and it’s precisely what makes this moment worth paying attention to.

A pricing philosophy built on patience, not momentum

Perhaps the most instructive part of the conversation, for anyone thinking about her work as a collector rather than simply an admirer, is how deliberately she resists letting demand dictate price. “I don’t think it benefits either an artist or a collector if prices suddenly jump simply because there has been a moment of attention,” she says. Instead, she weighs scale, medium, exhibition history and gallery representation together, with one priority above all: consistency.

“I want someone who collected my work a few years ago to feel that there is a logical progression as my career develops,” she explains. For a collector evaluating whether to acquire early, this is a meaningfully reassuring signal — an artist actively protecting the trust of her earliest buyers, rather than treating a sudden spike in visibility as licence to reprice everything overnight.

Korea and Singapore read the same painting differently

Asked how collectors in her two current markets differ, Chae doesn’t flatten the comparison into a simple story about East versus West. In Korea, she says, collectors often arrive with immediate cultural fluency — a tiger, a magpie, a pine tree, the visual grammar of minhwa, are recognised on sight, sometimes triggering a personal or nostalgic response tied to a specific place.

In Singapore, the entry point is different. “People may first become interested in the broader story,” she says — her own movement between Korea and the United States, New York and Seoul, and now Singapore. From there, curiosity about the work’s hybrid visual language follows. She credits Singapore’s own layered, international character for this: “the idea of belonging to more than one culture seems to resonate quite naturally here.”

The tiger as a traveling symbol

Tigers recur throughout Chae’s paintings, drawn from their complex role in Korean minhwa tradition — protective, powerful, but also, in her words, “humorous, awkward or surprisingly human.” She describes thinking of the tiger as a guardian moving between worlds, sometimes protecting a landscape, sometimes simply witnessing the space between past and present.

What strikes her most, though, is what happens once the symbol leaves her hands. International collectors unfamiliar with minhwa still read the tiger instinctively as a strong, protective presence — and some attach entirely personal meanings to it, associating the animal with a family member, a form of courage, someone they love. “At that point,” she says, “the symbol has travelled beyond my original intention and become part of their own story.” It’s a rare, specific insight into how cross-cultural work actually functions once it leaves the studio — value accruing not from a fixed meaning, but from how flexibly a symbol can hold a stranger’s private associations.

Refusing to choose a single category

One of the clearer insights into how Chae thinks about her own long-term positioning: she describes deliberately resisting pressure to be classified early as either a “digital artist” or a “traditional painter” — a false binary she traces back to her original training in motion graphics and corporate branding. Now, digital composition and image development sit at the start of her process, with extended hours of physical, hand-applied painting afterward reshaping the work.

“I stopped worrying about whether the work was Korean enough, Western enough, contemporary enough or traditional enough,” she says. “Once I accepted that the space between those things was actually the most authentic place for me to work from, the practice became much clearer.” For collectors, this refusal to settle into a single, easily marketable category is worth watching closely — it often distinguishes artists building something durable from those optimising for a quicker, narrower sale.

Where this is heading

Looking ahead, Chae describes wanting the work to extend well beyond canvas — into installation, public art, fashion and objects — while deliberately building relationships across Singapore, Hong Kong and the US rather than remaining centred on a single market. “I want to keep building a recognisable universe,” she says. “When someone encounters one of my paintings, whether it is in Seoul, Singapore or somewhere completely unfamiliar to me, I would love for them to feel that they have entered the same world.”

For Singapore’s collector base specifically — a city well practised in recognising value before it’s fully priced in, whether in art, gemstones or rare editions — Chae’s current stage offers precisely that kind of opportunity: an artist whose pricing discipline, cross-cultural fluency and refusal to be rushed suggest a practice built to compound in value over years, not spike and fade over a single season.

All photos in the article from the artist’s official website