My installations and the insertion of a physical body facilitate an occupied territory as a platform for opened dialogues, both internal and external. In my exploration in body as a medium, I find cathartic gratification and confrontational immediately satisfying. During the hours of cutting, the silk flower petals are shredded into unrecognizable fragments of pigment to be used in installations.
In past installations, I worked with volunteers and members of my family. Together we disassembled and hand-shredded collected silk flowers, then laid them on the floor, replicating my mother’s wedding blanket patterns, called seck-dong. My methodical destruction and labor-intensive reassembly of the silk flowers creates an aesthetic happening, turning a space into an introspective site that fosters dialogues. The intentional simplicity in materials and my process extends an invitation to the viewer to access the work in multiple dimensions and demystifies the art-making process. Even the process of cutting, once my private act, is now being shared in a public realm. Recent public collaboration projects have led me to investigate boundaries between the roles of artist, viewer, volunteers, audience, media, and so on. These communal experiences create more individually owned internal memory, like a song that recalls a certain time and place. The extremely vulnerable nature of my installations holds unspoken potential of a disruption in silence.
Through the menial process of making, selective collections of found objects transform into a poignant residuum of the past and the present. The fragility of memory, rupture of loss, and violence that is accompanied in mourning have been an essential part of my visual construction. My work is at a turning point that seeks to connect the heavy investment of labor present in my process and materials with the specificity of architectural space and the interior landscape of raw emotions. It is my attempt to visualize the hours of rituals used to remember the past and present, beckoning myself to reconcile my past through this transformative act. Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia denotes an idea of innate violence and destructiveness as the essence of desire. In my work, this desire to regain or possess for the sake of gratification validates a rather destructive mourning process as a means to redeem something equivalent to what has been lost.
In A Landscape Anew,
The Hudgens Center for the Arts, Duluth, GA
In past installations, I worked with volunteers and members of my family. Together we disassembled and hand-shredded collected silk flowers, then laid them on the floor, replicating my mother’s wedding blanket patterns, called seck-dong. My methodical destruction and labor-intensive reassembly of the silk flowers creates an aesthetic happening, turning a space into an introspective site that fosters dialogues. The intentional simplicity in materials and my process extends an invitation to the viewer to access the work in multiple dimensions and demystifies the art-making process. Even the process of cutting, once my private act, is now being shared in a public realm. Recent public collaboration projects have led me to investigate boundaries between the roles of artist, viewer, volunteers, audience, media, and so on. These communal experiences create more individually owned internal memory, like a song that recalls a certain time and place. The extremely vulnerable nature of my installations holds unspoken potential of a disruption in silence.
Through the menial process of making, selective collections of found objects transform into a poignant residuum of the past and the present. The fragility of memory, rupture of loss, and violence that is accompanied in mourning have been an essential part of my visual construction. My work is at a turning point that seeks to connect the heavy investment of labor present in my process and materials with the specificity of architectural space and the interior landscape of raw emotions. It is my attempt to visualize the hours of rituals used to remember the past and present, beckoning myself to reconcile my past through this transformative act. Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia denotes an idea of innate violence and destructiveness as the essence of desire. In my work, this desire to regain or possess for the sake of gratification validates a rather destructive mourning process as a means to redeem something equivalent to what has been lost.
In A Landscape Anew,
The Hudgens Center for the Arts, Duluth, GA
