Artist Statement
I explore a woman’s gaze of the world, of herself and of the relations between, and I do this in terms of the social and psychological aspects in representational paintings. As a Korean-Canadian woman artist, I recognize that I was once saturated with the cultural values of Korean culture’s homogenizing patriarchy and a Eurocentric art education. Now, in my work and in my life, I have been undertaking an ongoing process of individual modernization. I find agency through my painting practice, where I can overcome the shadows of colonization and patriarchal paradigms.
In my In Her Eyes series, women are the subjects themselves, who represent their thoughts and experiences from their own points of view. Inspired by courageous women, I express the embodied perspectives and experiences of how women choose to move, explore and live in Newfoundland and Labrador. This itinerary is filled with hopeful, mysterious and terrifying life moments. The journey of becoming oneself in Newfoundland involves life challenges in encountering the new environment with all of one’s past memories. Boats and vehicles don’t simply enable a woman to move, they can also amplify her experiences and reveal how home appears when she is at the helm.
I use opportunities to construct the self in transnational culture through the land I currently belong to. My effort is 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 a metaphorical self to travel through spaces and reconcile memories of the past and the present. Ultimately, I want to develop the possibilities of how I can represent my experience as ‘the other’, and my ongoing struggle to become “I”.