Tell Me How To Feel

Heartbreak feels like navigating through a pitch black room with open scissors grasped in both hands. This room is crowded with the objects of your life, people and things. The most debilitating thing about pain is the frustration of not knowing the exact point where you stand in taking responsibility for brokenness or knowing the outcome of forgiveness. In that despair, I often long for someone to tell me how to feel and how to move on to healing. Tell Me How To Feel (2016, detail) shows a small house buried beneath the ground, all the lights out and inhabitants long given up, floating in a space of soil and roots below an isolated winter woods.

The process of healing is also fraught with the traps of complacency, self doubt, isolation, myopia, ignorance, anger, regret and blame.

Seeing Stars From The Chicken Coop At Night 1

In the aftermath of the Korean War, my parents were one of the many millions of people left to struggle through cold and hunger in the ravaged countryside. While my father was eating bark peeled from trees, my mother slept in abandoned chicken coops with her family during the winters. She said the icicles hanging from the nails in the tin roofs gleamed like stars in the night sky. 

After having immigrated to New York in the early 80’s, my young parents were able to establish themselves financially. Now in the eve of their lives, my parents are reverting back into a survival mode of foraging, collecting, and hiding away of resources for an unknowable future. Our suburban house is a cramped collection of picked up second hand furniture, moldy clothing from church bins, and a basement pantry of years expired canned goods. It is as if my parents are preparing for another apocalypse. My house is a mirror of my parents’ innermost thoughts and fears. My parents are me. My body is a shrine.

Ghosts Live Here

Show the shell of a family home that has been overgrown by time. In many ways, time becomes the frame around these shrines that house smaller houses as it echoes and remembers its own trace existence and entombs its corporeal self. 

The presence of dust and dirt signify that aging and decomposition have begun. Dust falls from our skin as if we leave a trail to signify our course of living. Dust means there has been a long enough history to compile. The dirt is nutriment and feeds the stores of seeds that hold my memories. Smells and textures, sounds and images trigger the recurrence of a memory like the wind that shifts stale air trapped inside a drawer closed for a long time. Like a time portal, that opened drawer drags and pushes into my brain all the things I have forgotten.

Break My House

Is a family tree housed in a gallery of real and fake memories that is in the process of being destroyed by bombs that have fallen through the ground. It tells of the beginning and end of a biological family lineage that is bookended with surviving a war of poverty and immigration to death by attrition of health, fertility, and dementia. 

I think about movement and sound and come to a childhood memory. There’s a road that cut across the small town to home, from the bus station where relatives visiting from Seoul would get dropped off, to the tiny candy store and still bicycles, past the open verdant rice fields, the cow tied to a tree, and through the dark pine woods. These trees would be tall, with limbs gnarled, and tufts of spiky needles. They were majestic during the day and menacing at night. These were the trees that ghost stories came from. These were the silent homes of a million living things and a million dead things. 

Half a century ago, my mother’s oldest brother was blown up by a leftover but live bomb. And a little after that, her oldest sister killed herself after being raped during the war. Twenty years ago, my cousin threw herself off a building because her mother-in-law terrorized her. Fourteen years ago, my grandmother hung herself because her children did not love her.

Ten years we have loved each other. Ten years we have hated each other. Ten bombs we have gingerly carried along our history. Forty years I have loved myself. Forty years I have hated myself. 

My mother carefully cuts off and saves for me all her Crepe Myrtle seed pods so I can immortalize them in gold. My mother is me. My body is a shrine. 

My Cousin Jung Jung Jumps

The echoes in stories show that there is an ending to regret and suffering, perhaps with forgiveness. Kindred spirits are sought out so that their stories can resonate with me and I know I am not alone. My Cousin Jung Jung Jumps is an altarpiece in memory of my doppelgänger cousin who jumped off a building after being mercilessly bullied by her strict Korean mother-in-law. I grew up loving and then hating her until she no longer lived in this world, and I found my parallel as well as divergence with her. 

The Other Grandmother’s House

Mythologies and monsters are created to explain catastrophe and blame. In The Other Grandmother’s House (2018), in a house in a dense mire of woods dwells a possible evil grandmother. In my childhood, I often visited my grandmother’s home in the Korean farmside, and would find another small grandmother sitting placidly at her small moveable vanity on the porch. She was pretty and kind. And unassuming. When I was older, I learned that she was the wife of my grandfather and that my father and all his siblings were the children born to a surrogate woman, my grandmother. I hated the other grandmother for leaving mine without a station in life other than placeholder. And now in my womanhood, I understand the loneliness and devaluation of this barren woman.

Backyard Rituals

I recall much of my childhood re-examine the memory of beauty and light in contrast to the stark truth of perspective. So much of the immigrant experience is about realizing the dreams of parents who sacrifice past lives to start again by scratching at the American soil of gold and plastic. Backyard Rituals 2 (2020) retells the relish of weekends as a latchkey child of the early 80’s when my parents were busy working at the gift shop that eked out the mortgage on their suburban home.

Saturday Morning Cartoons in 1986

Living the American dream meant a ranch style house surrounded by mossy lawns and shadowy trees. In 1986, the soil was dark and the lily of the valleys were fairies. While all our parents were at their gift shop and grocery and laundromat stores, on this summer Saturday morning, my cousins and I watched Loony Toons and then played in the yard after we got tired of the ghost in the basement. We trapped and then killed an alien, each throwing a stone on dares. My fat cousin Earl took a boulder and smashed it, just like he stomped and burst the fingernail sized frogs in Epcot Center the summer before - laughing with his piggy eyes. I will never forget the praying mantis or those frogs.

Let’s Keep It (Us) Together

The process of healing is also done by smashing the body and ripping it open to expose the ugly and broken promises. It is the examination of a mortician and archeologist looking through the deceased and obsoleteness. I was taught that my body was my shrine, that I was accountable for it. Let’s Keep It (Us) Together (2018) uses delicate wires to bind together a house that has undergone autopsy to determine the lingering trauma of the trials of family members living under one roof.

When We Moved Here

A tree grows through the ruins of a pioneer’s home, the one built after journeying through the wild American frontier. 

I am recreating a landscape from a false memory, that is a memory from imagination. As an immigrant to America during the early 80’s, I watched countless Loony Toon cartoons where technicolor paintings of the American frontier became the gold standard of success - a final destination of smooth surfaces and brilliant colors. It was the mysterious landscape hiding Babe the Blue Ox and the sad Yeti. I have visited Yosemite, Yellowstone, and driven so many hours around the beautiful roads of this land that I love. 

And as much as the dream remains the same conjured frozen memory, a parallel set of perceptions also has formed in which it is a land of unknowns and fears. I understand this particularly as an adult coming to see the outer bounds of the gold paved roads in which we fear for not only the loss of our natural habitats and resources due to a stubborn and blindly committed climate change, but the definitions to my claim to have the right to explore America is also being swept away as if its foundations are also eroding.