Artist Statement

I translate historical photographs into textile portraiture to explore how memory becomes a vessel for identity construction. My work highlights the simultaneously invisible and hypervisible quality of displaced communities, whose existence between multiple cultures yields conflicting ideas of identity, home, and belonging. Drawing on my own experience as a Korean born and raised in Japan, my work speaks to the inherited narratives of diasporic Koreans and “third culture kids” as a whole, raising questions about how cultural identities are constructed in relation to fractured conceptions of “home”.

My textile portraits collage disparate texts into an archive of personal history, revealing the composite nature of diasporic narratives. Each piece begins from personal or journalistic documents, including photographs, letters, and traditional Korean folk art. I recreate figures from public memory—such as colonial era Korean independence activists and modern pro-democracy student protestors—as well as from personal memory, such as my immediate and extended family. Inherited historical traumas and personal childhood wounds are recollected through these portraits, carefully assembled through the intimate acts of hand-dyeing, piecing, stitching, and quilting. These slow, handiwork processes are an act of remembrance, allowing me to mend the narratives disrupted by displacement and reconnect with the people whose histories inform my own. In representing figures of the past, parts of the captured image become lost, reflecting the inevitable cultural distortion of displaced communities.