I am an interdisciplinary artist working across printmaking, painting, sculpture, textiles, folding, and installation. My practice asks how materials can hold lived experience and how a life shaped by movement, displacement, and cultural translation can be understood through touch. Pressure, layering, stitching, and the repetition of gestures become ways to catalog memory and the shifting forms of identity. As a gay, first-generation Korean immigrant, I work within a third culture space that is formed through migration and the continual negotiation between what is inherited and what is transformed. My work draws from the multiple lives I have led to arrive where I am today, moving between languages, places, and expectations while learning to assemble and reassemble the idea of belonging.
Folding has been central to my life for more than two decades. It is both a method and a way of structuring thought. A fold and a crease marks the moment when surface becomes form and when a flat plane becomes a body in space. The act of folding mirrors the ways cultural histories and diasporic experiences overlap and settle into new shapes. Making with my hands allows me to work through the tension between assimilation and resistance. These gestures become a form of translation and an index of the decisions, pressures, and negotiations that shape a migrant life.
I work with garments, textiles, graphite transfers, and pressure prints because these materials already carry their own histories. A worn shirt holds the memory of the figure even when the body is no longer present. I am interested in this absence and in the traces that creases, seams, stains, and residues leave behind. These marks hold labor, touch, and intimacy, folding together the layered shifts of identity shaped by migration and memory. My work examines how these traces settle into material and how they form a language of presence in the absence of the figure.
In recent years, my practice has expanded toward socially grounded and participatory forms such as environments that encourage viewers to move, to walk through, and at times to touch the work. These spaces unsettle expectations about who is allowed to belong and invite people to reconsider how memory is carried, shared, and felt. My installations work against the expectation that art must be read through a singular way of looking. I want the experience of the work to introduce a different mode of perception, one that honors the complexity of layered histories and invites viewers to question what they think they already know.