Artist statement

My current research suggests questions about how Korean art has maintained and developed its uniqueness. Deliberately using the Korean paper Hanji, which is similar to Japanese Hwaji but has different material properties, I examine the uniqueness of Korean art as it has developed under the influence of other countries on the Korean Peninsula. I also examine how Korean art has been transformed as it embraces Western modernism. My aim is to deal with my identity between my traditional and current cultural position by looking at the process of assimilation and transform of Korean art tradition into Western art.

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The resulting forms address the way the cultures interact through the process of bridging and crossing objects and media to understand my past, present and future. 

In unit two I have been reading the book, “Korean art from the 19th Century to the present” and find the ideas of the significance of modernism in Korean art. This is because, compared to the West, modernism in Korean art started from the dark history of the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953) and was in a period of conflict.

I am also trying to construct knowledge and meaning from my cross-cultural experience by reading books on constructivism that combine separate elements to create a compositional whole.

The art of John Lathan has suggested avenues of experiment for my practice and by subverting books' value and structure as repositories of knowledge and exploiting their object quality. I have been exploring understanding its objects away from functionality and aesthetics by destroying some of the structure of the book.