Home consists of the memories and sensations we associate with the place(s) we felt most loved and nurtured. Yet as the passage of time shapes our life trajectories, our idea of home becomes increasingly fragmented as the distance between then and now becomes irreconcilable. We cannot go back in time to that moment and relive it. Places morph; memories falter. But in spite of, or perhaps because of this, we are all looking for a place to call home. 

As a child growing up in 1980s Los Angeles, I remember being loaded into my parents’ car—paper and pencil in hand—for the hour and a half journey to my grandfather’s motel in Lake Elsinore. My entire family would converge at this desert hot spring oasis along with my five aunts and five uncles, their children, grandparents, and even a great grandparent to play in the pool all day and feast into the night. But with death, divorce, illness and disputes, this home only remains as a memory and in aging photographs. This yearning for an unattainable past has shaped the choices I made for many of my formative years growing up in Los Angeles from getting involved with gangs and graffiti at their height to even a fraternity in college, and I further explore this search for belonging in my work.

My work plays with that idea of manufacturing nostalgia as integrated with my family history, memory, and identity. My artistic approach is drawn from a sense of loss or longing, looking for a place to belong.

My practice consists of paintings, installations, videos, and large-scale murals as a medium to preserve, recreate, and document this precarious idea of “home”– defining it, seeking it, losing it, our relationship to it. I appropriate Korean symbols, patterns, colors, traditions that are simultaneously so familiar and yet also unintelligible to me in their storied meanings. Through my work, I explore the tension between the Korea that I know which was gleaned from my family who left it in the 1970s never to look back and the now drastically different, current-day Korea that has rapidly distanced itself from its history, and in turn myself. By interpolating the past and present in tandem, I blur the distinctions across our experiences, generations, and lifetimes to conjure up a visual depiction of this instability in our conceptions of home.