Valery Jung (정) Estabrook

valery@valeryestabrook.com
insta: @valeryestabrook
twitter: @KoreanFanDeath

ABOUT

Valery Jung Estabrook is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans new media, sculpture, and installation. Much of Estabrook’s practice is informed by her experience growing up as a biracial Korean-American in rural Virginia. Raised by self-taught Asian pear specialists on a small family orchard, she draws from the natural world and her cultural identity to explore themes of memory, grief, and transformation.

She received a BA in Visual Art from Brown University and an MFA in Drawing and Painting from Brooklyn College. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Auxiliary Projects (Brooklyn), APSU’s New Gallery (Clarksville), and the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities (Ann Arbor). She has also exhibited work at EFA Project Space (New York), Temple Contemporary (Philadelphia), Gallery Korea at the Korean Cultural Center (New York), Bideodromo Video Festival (Bilbao, Spain), and CHANNELS Video Art Biennial (Melbourne, Australia), among others. Estabrook is also a longtime alumna of SPRING/BREAK Art Show, where she has participated as both a curator and solo artist (New York and Los Angeles), and has debuted multiple projects at Currents New Media Festival (Santa Fe).

In 2018, Estabrook received the AHL-T&W Foundation Gold Contemporary Visual Art Award, an annual prize recognizing artists of Korean heritage. Her Impeach Mint Project, an “anti-commemorative” coin series, was acquired by the Bank of Canada Museum for its permanent collection in 2022. She has been an artist-in-residence and fellow at Vermont Studio Center, ChaNorth, and was a Paula and Edwin Sidman Fellow at the University of Michigan. Her work has been featured in Museé Magazine, Surface Magazine, Artspace, and VICE.

Her most recent work, Full Bloom, is a site-specific installation created in collaboration with Lance McGoldrick that expands the intimate interior of a working vault into an endless desert garden. Hidden behind the vault’s thick metal door, visitors encounter a trove of preserved, glass-like Datura flowers illuminated from within, each subtly shifting as if alive and aware. A gentle night soundscape invites visitors to slow down and experience a space that seems to exist outside of ordinary time and place. The work incorporates both handcraft and technological processes, unfolding through ever-changing cycles of light and sound, with no two cycles exactly alike. Funded by a grant from the City of Albuquerque Arts & Culture, Full Bloom is currently on view at Gallery One’s Art Vault through September 25, 2026. 

Estabrook is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she works in the University of New Mexico’s Department of Film & Digital Arts and teaches in UNM’s Interdisciplinary Arts program.