Jeff Tang | “Find What You Want On Your Own, So it Stays Original”

Art can reveal a lot about the world, and even more about the artist. Jeff Tang’s work, characterized by serious subjects contrasted with bright colors, appropriately represents this unconventional hipster artist-photographer with a fascination for death and a collection of 30 varieties of cacti. Join OA (while trying not to get kicked out of Ranch 99 market), as the talented, free-spirited guy behind 12FV talks about passion vs. marketability in art, his reliability on technology, and why he still takes photos with film.

• What takes up most of your time right now? My day job, photography and art. I work at a wig place – I do web marketing and manage six people. I do everything.
• What is your guilty pleasure? Using the internet too much.
• Favorite color: Sea foam green.
• Relationship status: Single.
• Pet Peeve: When people are afraid of strangers.
• What you first notice about a person: How down to earth they are.
• Favorite medium of art: It’s split between photography and illustration.
• Can you speak/read/write Chinese: I can speak. I can read really easy stuff — not the newspaper, and write really easy characters.
• Favorite piece of clothing you own: I really like this shirt I’m wearing right now – it’s like military wool but not the rough wool so it can feel good on your skin; the kind of wool that they don’t really make anymore.
• Fun fact: I stopped using soap and shampoo for three months. I use nothing — just water. I think it works.
• Funner fact: I quit cigarettes. I’m trying to quit coffee. I’m trying to eat more fruits and veggies. I put on my retainer after eight years of not wearing it.

OA: You graduated from the University of California, Irvine with an International Studies degree — when and how did you discover art and design?

OA: So we know 12FV stands for RiotFive. What does it mean?
JT: It was this brand that I started in high school. It’s not the normal sense of things — it’s very in tune with that. A riot is like revolting; that’s the basis. I liked the number of five at the time and I wanted more characters in the name.

OA: Since you never went to formal art school, how has that aided or obstructed your artistic toolbox?

OA: What is your current inspiration? How do you translate this inspiration onto your canvas?
JT: Japanese Folklore has always inspired me. Everything inspires me, really;  everything about society. My designs have Asian influences, so I take it from my childhood and Chinese stories. I do Chinese calligraphy and I incorporate that into my art too. Everything that has influenced me gets subconsciously transcribed into what I do – maybe not so much in photography, but more so  in illustration. Photography is capturing life.

OA: Let’s talk colors. Your trademark is really bright colors meshed with serious and abstract subjects. When you’re drawing these with pencil, do you already have the colors in mind, or does it come to you as you’re coloring on Illustrator?

JT: I do it all in stages. Coloring is the last stage. They come at the end, completely independently from the subjects. I use playful colors, but my subjects are really serious or maybe even scary. But I like that pull; I like that tension between playful colors but serious subjects. I have a lot of death in my art and my favorite Chinese calligraphy is the word “death.” I like to have a contrast — really good and really bad.

OA: Death/the fragile state of life is really present in your artwork. What about it fascinates you?

JT: What fascinate me are the things that people don’t talk about, whatever is taboo, whatever goes against the grain. I want to try to talk about things that people are too scared to talk about. Death is a really scary topic because we’re all going to die. It’s not a happy thing to talk about. I want to investigate it because I don’t think it’s as scary as everyone thinks it is. So if I talk about it and I accept it, then maybe other people will accept it too.

OA: You try to create awareness through art and street wear, and your “About” section, lists issue after issue we deal with in every walk of life. Which, out of all of these, are you most passionate about?

JT: Technology. It’s the whole thing about how I think I use the internet too much. Everything I do is on the computer now. A lot of my most recent pieces are people in tech suites. We need technology. It’s bettering our quality of life, but it’s also suffocating us and we’re not going out as much. We don’t even talk that much – I don’t even call people anymore, I just text message. It’s more efficient – I can text like 40 people in a day; whereas if I called, I could only call 4 people. But, in that efficiency, you lose a lot of reality. Everything becomes virtual. A lot of people play video games, and I’m on Facebook all the time, which sucks. It’s this new virtual reality becoming as equally big as reality reality.

OA: As an artist, there’s always the challenge of balancing what can sell and what is marketable versus staying true to your art. You mentioned a desire to move away from -tshirts because of that. How would you ideally like to share your art?

OA: What is it about cacti that you love so much?
JT: I just really love them – I don’t know what about them but probably because they look really irregular. I like weird things. I have almost 30 varieties of cacti at home.

OA: Since the inception of 12FV, how has your art evolved? How have you grown as an artist?
JT: I don’t really know how I’ve evolved, but I feel like there is always natural progression in an artist’s life based on their experiences or their maturity. For art, it’s all about being able to communicate what’s in your brain and I think I’ve improved in that. Before, I did think just in purely aesthetics and did what I thought looked pretty. When I just started in 2003, it really was just graphic designing like turtles and circles; things that don’t mean anything to me, but graphically that look really cool to me. But now, I instill things with meaning and I try to take a logical approach to make it have a deeper reasoning.

OA: How supportive is your family of your artistic endeavor?
JT: I have a full time job, so it’s not like I’m starving. They trust me in making my own decisions.