Los Angeles
2019
42” x 112”
Corrugated cardboard, newspaper, tissue, acrylic, metal clips, nails
California
2023
48" x 138"
Corrugated cardboard, newspaper, tissue, acrylic, metal clips, nails
Armenia/Korea
2024
48” x 178”
Corrugated cardboard, newspaper, tissue, acrylic, metal clips, nails
Conversations with my Father
2024
64” x 243”
Canvas, newspaper, tissue, acrylic, metal clips, nails
Mapping the Negotiations
2013
Digital video, plastic stools
Installation exhibited at HCMC Photography Gallery, MIT Wolk Gallery, Cambridge; Seoul Urbanism Biennale; USC Cinema Gallery, Los Angeles
Lexicon
2010
Photography, plexiglass, metal.
Wedding the Divide:
3 Installations
2002
Digital video, textile, rocks, feathers, sand, ink, paper
Artist Bio
I was born in New York in 1968.I come from a family who have been refugees, immigrants, missionaries, and citizens in North
Korea, South Korea, China, Germany, Ethiopia, and the United States. Over the years, I have
moved and set up life in 12 cities across 8 nations. These itinerant lived experiences are
foundational to the themes of migration and diaspora in my work. Sometimes mute and other times fluent, I explore the role and limits of text and language in my work.I now live and work in Los Angeles, making maps. My cartographies take the form of abstract
collage paintings, cinematic videos, interactive media, and installations, traversing the tension
between the material and digital world. My social practice research involves long-term
collaborations with community-based arts organizations, building cultural asset maps that
recover histories and narratives of marginalized peoples and places.
I am a co-founder of RAP: the Race, Arts, and Place collective. My work has been shown
internationally. I hold faculty appointments at USC’s Price School of Public Policy and Roski
School of Art and Design.
Artist Statement
Since 2014 I have been collecting ethnic newspapers and the words on buildings in Los
Angeles and Orange County. I’m fascinated by how people express their culture with
text plastered all over the city. In my urban expeditions, I often find newspapers in small
ethnic markets, shops, and on the street. Sometimes I have to track down back issues
from publishers and everyday people leading to wonderful conversations about why
they keep newspapers that are on the verge of becoming obsolete. To me, this linguistic
landscape signifies freedom, messy democracy, and the human will to communicate.I have returned to creating scroll maps as the format of my artwork. The maps are
becoming longer, wrapping around building corners, engaging the viewer’s body to
move along the maps, reading portions at a time. The newspapers of different
languages are the scroll’s base foundation on which I layer fragments of more words,
colors, and textures that speak to languages’ handmade and ephemeral construction
and limits. These extend the recurring themes in my work of grid systems, manual manipulation, cultural interaction, and nonverbal gestures.While contemporary cartographic conventions were invented to conquer
territories, I seek to de-colonize the map. I survey overlooked peoples and places
rather than reify borders. Rather than static facts, my cartographies consist of
ephemeral space-time topographies displaying alternative cultural vocabularies.
While maps use names to make spaces into places, conversely all languages have a
spatial structure. Our perceptions and memories are spatialized because we are
embodied beings.
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link to video projected in installation
