James Jean

Sketchbooks have sustained a vital space in Jean's practice, solidifying importance in his time during art school as a rejection of the strict academic focus of visual arts studies. In favor of the freedom found in sketching during his childhood, Jean embraced sketchbooks as a means of exploring figures and imaginative creatures, synthesizing doodles, line drawings, and journalistic elements with more polished compositions in black-and-white and color. For Jean, sketchbooks are spaces for both experiment or study and for finished artworks in their own right.[15]

In 2007, Jean created a mural for the Prada Epicenter stores in New York and Los Angeles.[16] He also created a backdrop for Prada's Spring/Summer 2008 show in Milan.[17]

Aspects of the Epicenter mural and the Milan wallpaper were transformed into clothing, handbags, shoes, and packaging. Prada undertook a global campaign that featured Jean's work in advertising environments, animation, and special events.

In 2008, Jean again collaborated with Prada, developing an animated short based on the wallpapers, clothing, and accessories produced in 2007. He wrote, storyboarded, and did the visual development for the animation, which would be eventually titled "Trembled Blossoms", taken from the poem "Ode to Psyche”, by John Keats.

Jean reunited with Prada to create prints for its Resort 2018 collection. He described the visual effect as a "tangle of floral elements occasionally populated and overrun by rabbits."[18] Prada brought the collection to Shanghai as part of the brand's unveiling of Rong Zhai, a 20th-century mansion it restored, and exclusive looks were debuted in vivid reds, yellows, and blues.[18]

Jean's images were used for the brand's SS2018 Menswear collection. His work also served as the set design for the collection's premiere at the Via Fogazzaro space. Jean's collaboration with Prada brought images inspired by graphic novels to high-fashion pieces, blending the superhuman with the human, and with a nod to the thick black lines that divide illustration panels.[19]

Jean created the poster art for three films in 2017: Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. Employing different media for each artwork, he hand-painted two character posters for mother! (one for Jennifer Lawrence and another for Javier Bardem), made a charcoal drawing for The Shape of Water,[20] and used digital drawing tools for Blade Runner 2049.[21] As part of his creative process, Jean collaborated closely with both Darren Aronofsky and Guillermo del Toro. Del Toro, a long-time fan of Jean's work, describes his drawings as having "a delicate nature to them and beautiful line work that is at the same time realistic and sort of elevated into a style of his own."[20] Jean's posters uniquely evoke the tone and mood of each film without overtly revealing depictions of plot.

In 2019, Lotte Museum of Art in Seoul hosted "Eternal Journey," a major retrospective of Jean's work. Over 500 works were on view in the exhibition, including large-scale paintings, sculpture, installation, video art, 150 comic book covers, and more than 200 drawings that served as the inspiration for many of the included works. Nine large-scale paintings explored the theme of obangsaek, or the five fundamental or cardinal colors, a traditional color schema representative of the order of the universe.

Collaborating again with Judson Studios, the oldest family-operated stained-glass maker in the US,[27] Jean created Gaia - Yellow Earth Center (2019), the centerpiece of the Lotte Museum of Art exhibition. The sculpture expands upon his earlier explorations into stained glass for "Azimuth," bringing his visual vocabulary to the traditional medium. Over eight feet in height, the illuminated sculpture, which combines water jet cutting, hand and airbrush painting, and fused glass, depicts the goddess Gaia with a slinking tiger in an all-over composition of natural and geometric elements.

The exhibition was on view from April 4 through September 1, 2019 and is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with essays by Yoon-Kyung Kwon, Chief Curator at Lotte Museum of Art; Hee-Kyung Song, Art Historian and Professor at Ewha Womans University; and Christopher James Alexander, Architecture, Art, and Design Consultant, Principal of CJA Creative Collaborations.[28]