etc.
[March 21, 2024]
My grandmother’s grandfather was a Korean Arts & Culture Minister for the last generation of the pre-colonial Joseon Dynasty. When I make work I think a lot about what he sees and what he thinks about and what he loves. I know that he loves my grandmother as I love her. My work across sculpture, performance, and image cites Korean craft legacies, histories of Korean radical resistance, Chondoism (천도교) [1], the intuitive feeling of the erotic [2], queer performance theory, and my mother. I return to these traditions to make sense of how my shell and my spirit are breathing extensions of past and imminent generational echoes, severance, survival, and joy. Weaving this matrix of autobiographical and sociohistorical relations, I fabricate and embody an ever-evolving universe of tesseract, playful, and monstrous avatars [3]. In the tender company of these living monsters and through their embodied performances, I sit with what it might feel like to trust desire, unabashed sentimentality, and ancestral intuition as felt manifestations of an expanding network of past and speculative intergenerational relations. Adapting the primordial strategies of the ferments, the ghosts, and the tricksters, those who love me the most lead me te to each hypertextual site, text, community, and experience no matter the metaphysical distance between us; all I have to do is learn to listen.
While this work is firmly grounded in a network of genetic, spiritual, and communal inheritances, I prioritize the understanding that all I have inherited is not necessarily all mine to share. To disclose too much would be to expose these delicate and unassimilable root structures to surveillance and commodification. In my work, I am interested in how bodies, spirits, performances, and images that lie beyond the public’s view assert an intimate type of refusal: refusal to be “discovered”, refusal to be re-appropriated, a fundamental refusal to be known by the world. Glitching and negotiating the expectations of craft, minoritarian performance, and archive, I choose to encrypt our archive carefully and lovingly close.
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I only ever met my grandmother four times during this life, 전종남. Almost everything I know about her has been communicated to me via my mother’s memory. Yet, the women in my family carry a generational history of dementia; this archive is meant to outlive us. This makes me approach learning and making with a certain urgency - I just make work about things that I don’t want to forget.
[1] Cheondosim (Chondoism), Wikipedia, last modified March 2, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheondoism.
[2] Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 1984), 53-9.
[3] Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York University Press, 2015).
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[undated, 2022]
My grandmother’s grandfather was a Korean Arts & Culture Minister for the last generation of the pre-colonial Joseon Dynasty. When I make work I think a lot about what he sees and what he thinks about and what he loves. I know that he loves my grandmother as I love her. My work across film, sculpture, text, and installation invokes Korean craft imagery, folklore, shamanistic performance, oral histories, children’s literature, archival photographs, and translation. I return to these traditions to make sense of how my shell and my spirit are protected by, surrounded by, and interconnected with generational echoes, distance, severance, survival, and joy. By constructing this work, I am learning to weave and articulate my own matrix of autobiographical and sociohistorical relations. I am firmly grounded in genetic, spiritual, and communal inheritances, yet I am always aware that all I have inherited is not necessarily all mine to share. To disclose too much would be to potentially expose these delicate and intergenerational root structures to surveillance and commodification. By glitching the expectations of craft, language, and curation, I encrypt my archive selfishly opaque. The resulting language is one of playfulness - one of prismatic color - one of polyfill - one of homesickness - one of mythological characters - one of vowels - one of footnotes - one of wrinkles - one of ghosts. My practice is an exercise in an embodied mother tongue.
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I only ever met my grandmother four times during her life, 전종남. Almost everything I know about her has been communicated to me through oral storytelling. Yet, the women in my family carry a history of generational dementia; this archive is meant to outlive me. This makes me approach learning and craft with an inherent urgency - I just make work about things that I don’t want to forget.