Her Strength

I explore a woman’s gaze in relation to social and psychological aspect in representational paintings. As a Korean-Canadian woman artist, I have realized that I once was saturated with the cultural values of homogenizing patriarchy of Korean culture and Eurocentric art education. I experience on going individual modernization process in which finding agency through painting practice by overcoming shadows of colonization and patriarchal paradigm.

In Her Eyes series, women are the subject themselves, who represent their thoughts and experience. Inspired by courageous women, I express women choose to move, explore and live in Newfoundland and Labrador. The passage filled with hopeful, mysterious and terrifying life moment. The journey transpires life challenges confronting the new environment as well as past memories. Transportation such as a boat and vehicle enable a woman to move and experience.

I use opportunities to construct the self in transnational culture through the land currently I belong. My effort to continue the process of rupturing the wall between self and other. I express my othered self and I recognize my otherness as a subject by using metaphorical self, space and memories of the past and the present. Ultimately, I want to develop the possibilities of representation as the other, I centre and decentred the self-awareness through struggle to become “I”.