Artist Statement
At the heart of my identity is the years I spent in South Korea, Hong Kong, and currently the United States. My artwork, phrased as simply as possible, is about my confusing cultural identity that has been forged out of being unable to rely on a singular cultural influence throughout my childhood and how this affects my daily life and how I view culture and nationality.
Within this body of work specifically, I believe that each individual piece is a physical manifestation of different sides of my identity that I’ve shucked off from my mind to visually manipulate. These sides directly correlate to the timeline of my developmental process. In that process, I transitioned from forcing myself to singularly identify as a Korean while refusing to realize that I was different compared to other Korean natives, then feeling betrayed when I inevitably felt let down due to personal ideologies and nature not reflecting that of the country that I oh-so longed to fully identify with. At this point, as I type these words, I am at the stage where I’ve come to accept that I am fortunate to have multiple cultural influences.
Is this section of my artist statement difficult to understand? That’s because I myself still haven’t been able to identify half of the emotions I have. And I guess that’s where I am; having reached acceptance, I have started to look back at the short life I’ve lived so far and identified how my mixed cultural identity has presented. It affected aspects of my daily life that I wasn’t even aware of until recently, like the straining relationship I had with my father, or self-image based on how my more traditional Korean mother saw me and how I saw myself. All of this is visible in my artwork.
Through much experimentation, I came to find that ceramics and sumi ink are mediums that I feel comfortable with. Porcelain is a highly treasured medium with great historical significance in South Korea, and when I kneaded my first porcelain pieces, it felt like I was discovering something about a culture that always seemed so foreign yet so familiar to me. Sumi ink, however, fills me with very different emotions. It feels wild and elusive, with varying levels of intensity that can be achieved depending on the technique I use with the ink and brushes. There is cultural importance in the weight of the clay and the brush in my hands.
I want people to see my work and see me. I want them to see me standing in front of them, confronting them as they face my art head-on. To reach the point where my art can do this successfully, I plan to further experiment with sumi ink and porcelain and push those mediums as far as they will go. Conceptually, when I have comfortably reconciled with my identity crisis and the memories that come with it, I want to extend my message to further depictions of culture and social justice.
