STATEMENT OF WORK

As a diasporic Asian artist who has lived in Canada, France, Italy, and the U.S., I have always had a complex relationship with the notion of cultural identity. In my art, I create worlds constituted of memories and identities where I inhabit multiple characters and places all at once. Having explored the limits of the psychedelic in my early artworks, my new body of work blends surreal dreamscapes, classical painting techniques with CGI modeling to lend a sheen of realism to compositions of multilayered pastiche. When I lived in New York in my late 20s, I met my first Korean friend and roommate, Seulgi. Our sisterhood awakened my sense of Korean-ness. After leaving Brooklyn during the pandemic, I've painted intimate scenes that reflect on our home life—drinking beers, joking, sharing stories and the solitary bathing rituals Seulgi and I bonded over.  More recently, influenced by Korean SF novel Readymade Boddhisattva, I reimagined Korean folkloric creatures (tiger, dragon, turtle) in a sci-fi context, questioning the place of tradition in a hyper-technologized, uncertain world. I modeled the creatures and domestic objects in 3D software with the help of stock images, then translated them by applying oil paint on the uneven surface of the Korean mulberry paper glued to the canvas. Working simultaneously between the historic and the contemporary, Euro-Western and pan- Asian, I aim to connect the different worlds of my experience.