ARTIST STATEMENT

My practice currently explores the multiplicity of the self through layered drawings and paintings on translucent substrates. With a process rooted in drawing, I begin by stacking layers of figuration to convey movement, the experience of multiple temporalities, or various emotions felt simultaneously. I then work wet-into-wet with water-based media like acrylic paints, resulting in stains that complicate the initial framework, echo the translucency of the surface, and evoke notions of fluidity, malleability, and indelibility. Using plastic materials like poly silk and acrylics that suggest mimicry and hybridity, I consider ideas of synthetic personhood, thereby further implicating histories of race, gender, and sexuality at stake in my art and life.

Through a patient investigation of process and media, I consider painting as a way of working through and reflecting upon the porosity and relationality of the subject and object. My recent pieces put pressure on what literary scholar and cultural theorist Anne Anlin Cheng describes as the “imbrication of personhood and materialization.” As a (cisgender) queer and mixed-race Korean American woman artist, I use this perspective to explore the production of my intersectional identities. How might painting be used as a gesture and a form to connect aesthetic problems of representation to the implications of racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjecthood and objecthood?

Through the porosity of my substrate, every gesture—intentional and accidental—becomes permanently embedded in the painting’s body; I think about how this parallels the ways our actions and lived experiences become a part of who we are and how we relate to others. In the metaphors I draw between how I make my work and how I feel in my own skin, I hope to exploit, cannibalize, and resist ideas of affect, identity, and morality at stake in my practice.

— June 2024