Contact: What is Local
My discipline is related to memory, childhood, and literature. I am inspired first and foremost by New Jersey: its inhabitants (both man and animal), the landscape, the architecture and infrastructure. This is followed by literature, American poetry, Korean folk art and folk culture, carnatic music, & suburbia. When I look at the world I remind myself to find beauty in what is mundane, and my artistic process is a way of expressing what it is I see and experience. What I come into contact with. In my current practice, I am focused on creating fine-line charcoal drawing on raw canvas. Memory fades. It is ephemeral. My charcoal drawings are the ghostly impressions which pass through my mind.
In two panels titled “Snapshots of New Jersey i & ii” I remember my childhood summers. Memory, and the act of remembering, are things which degrade over time. I depict the memory of this landscape truthfully how it felt, and not as a mere copy of what you would see if you were to visit the property back then. I merge folk sensibilities with the North American landscape. In these two pieces, I remember my grandmother pointing to flowers, and telling me that they were opium. I remember my aunt teaching me how to catch dragonflies between my foreigner and middle finger. I remember catching frogs with my uncle and siblings, and fattening up the goldfish in a stinking pond. I remember the church parking lot, dominated by a towering tree and small plateau of rock, and the powerlines cutting across the landscape with the lights buzzing at night.
In my piece “Neighbors,” I sketch three large deer (they are sisters) backlit by the headlights of an unseen car. While they are local, they are also foreign in this space. The ominous beam of light catching them off guard. Similarly in “Bambina,” a fawn has been trapped behind a chainlink fence. Through a realistic rendering of the fawn, I bring to life her eyes and her loneliness. She is caught in the space, her legs petering out, with the stark black lines of the chains fencing her in. I remember her clear calls to her mother, who was on the other side eating casually.
My approach takes a surrealist turn in “Cigarette & Fish” depicting a powerful mackerel (which I would eat each in the summer month, marinated by my Grandmother: in gochujang, soy sauce, sesame oil). I juxtapose the realism of the fish with the unreal environment of the canvas. Where does the exhale of the tobacco end, where does the crest of the wave begin? Its tail flails, dancing in the intoxicating haze of the cigarette. I reference folk art in my work with the way I create clouds and configure my hand. The moon winks softly through the parted clouds.
