I believe that art should touch viewers without providing any statements about artwork. I also believe that an effective piece of artwork will contain a concept of the artist’s true experience, fine craftsmanship and a strength that will itself evoke an understanding in the audience. Art is a visual communication tool and it can be a curative process, through creative acts.
I have lived in three different cultures and the cross-cultural experience makes me question myself about who I am and where I am. Through creating artworks, I wish to share preliminary observations on the relationship between migration, as a quasi-physical and documentable sets of behaviors, and a particular post-migration quandary, the identity question of “Who am I?” or “Where am I?”
Born in Korea where I lived through adolescence, I had the good fortune to be exposed as an adult to two other and different cultures, Japanese and American. The amalgamation of all these migrations has fueled my passion for exploring artistically the many tensions involved in confirming one’s cultural and personal identities. As I began to reflect on my cultural and my artistic migrations, as I venture into the creation of new works and as I venture into exploring innovative ways of framing new or old concepts, I began to experience tension and I see tension as an outcome of migration. It certainly has been omnipresent in my nomadic life and in my ever-drifting art. I definitely witnessed, and still witness, tension in my endless, it seems, quest to understand the question of Identity.