As a diasporic Asian artist of Korean origin who
has lived in Canada, France, Italy, and the U.S., I have always had a complex
relationship to the notion of cultural identity. Discontinuity from a sense of
“homeland” has impelled me to negotiate my own ways of being in the present. In
my art, I create worlds constituted of fragmented memories and identities where
I inhabit multiple characters and places all at once.
My practice uses traditional mediums like painting and drawing to
create surreal dreamscapes containing free-flowing elements like hybrid
creatures and anthropomorphic plants. Magical and playful, yet touched with
uncanny darkness, these unreal environments allow me to collapse the distance
between the different worlds of my experience.
During my academic training in Italy, I spent four years studying Old
Masters’ techniques, immersed in the artifacts of Western/European art history.
Recently, I have returned to some of my earlier experiments with automatic
drawing and fantastical landscapes, combining those approaches with influences from Renaissance
painting while exploring a process that involves new 2-D and 3-D digital
techniques. Working with an expanded archive of images found online, I use CGI
modelling to lend a sheen of realism to enigmatic compositions of multilayered
pastiche, suspended somewhere between touchscreens and dreams.
Working simultaneously with the dualities between the historic and the
contemporary, Euro-Western and pan-Asian, I engage playfully with the question
of where I am now. Connecting different pasts and futures in non-linear
temporality, I aim to open a zone for imagination in which the viewer can contemplate
their own narrative.
