I’m authentically trying to make beautiful things out of these dark topics. I feel that in some ways beauty is subversive. Sentimentality is subversive. It’s so bad and something you don’t do in the art world. I’m interested in those things and try to use them to my benefit to pull the viewer in.
Read MoreMost of the works that I made in the last two years have been focusing on the feelings of nostalgia, displacement and struggle that come with cultural identity since moving from Seoul to New York
Read MoreAs roles and responsibilities become blended and integrated for artists, galleries, and institutions in the art world, artists are expected to take a more proactive approach to become involved and market themselves. As an artist you are more likely to have interest by making yourself fully accessible; building networks and interacting with your audience is key.
Read MoreIn my series No Unsacred Places, I photographed the backs of strip malls. I was attracted by how these places existed as objects. They have a certain monolithic beauty when viewed from behind, where there is no signage visible
Read MoreThe process of combing through the imagery and figuring out ways to manipulate it in order to make it relevant to us today, not in a literal sense, but a broad human sense, is something I’m trying to do. Art has always been a lens to look at what has happened in history to humanity in a more subjective, emotional, or ethereal way. So I don’t see what I’m doing by collecting and choosing to paint these images as any different than that. It’s just adding on to their documentation.
Read MoreThe important thing for me is movement. When you work on this big size, you have to physically move around the surface. It feels like a dancer moving their body. When I start, I don't have any ideas. The movement evolves into something else like shapes and composition. I start from a place of calmness, and don't seek to express immediate emotions.
Read MoreA lot of what I'm doing today is about different approaches to mark making. It becomes all about tempo, rhythm, and composition. I think of my paintings more like songs. In a song, you can't play 1/8 notes the whole time. In some of my older paintings, I used a paint scraper and moved it across the canvas at different speeds. At a certain point, I step back and pause to look before I begin again.
