I began the MOULTING series back in April 2021. It’s a series that I share on Substack. The series is a twelve-month-long experiment. Ever since my graduate school days, I have been thinking about my writing and my art making and trying to find a place where those two processes can come together, and not in the sense of my art being illustrations to my writing. I wanted the processes to be more closely fused together. They have certainly always inspired each other—I write about artworks I’ve created or art I wish to create, I create art inspired by something I’ve written—but they were always distinct from each other. Was it possible to blur the lines? Was it possible for my artistic practice to exist in a place where one medium didn’t dominate the other, where the two could exist equally valid, where the two couldn’t exist fully without the other? This blurring of the lines between mediums is important to me and pushes me to keep exploring through my work.

My parents were born in a Korea that was still under the colonial rule of Japan. My father often talks about how he was taught only Japanese in school. To this day, he knows Japanese but refuses to speak it, an act of defiance even as he approaches the age of ninety years. After WWII, Japan left Korea, and after a short period of time, the country was thrown into the Korean War. My father fought in that war as a sixteen-year-old young man. The 38th parallel was drawn, forever dividing a country, forever separating families. The Korean War has never officially ended. American troops still occupy South Korea in the DMZ, the DeMilitarized Zone. Korea’s recent past is fraught with the fight against colonialism and erasure, the fight against dictators, and the fight for democracy. There is a certain fragility to our existence.

I knew nothing of this as a child born in Seoul. But I caught glimpses of it in the stories my parents told me and cobbled together a past for myself.

The poet Don Mee Choi in her book DMZ Colony writes about her father who was a photojournalist in South Korea after the Korean War. The “infamous day” she refers to is the day Park Jung Hee took over the South Korean government after a successful military coup. She writes:

Because I was an infant, I have no memory of this infamous day except through my father’s memory. Memory’s memory. Memory’s child. My memory lives inside my father’s camera, the site where my memory was born, where my retina and my father’s overlap. . . . Overlapping memory always longs for return, the return of memory.

I relate so much to this, the idea of memory giving birth to memory. It is a fragile connection. Such is my own fragile connection to the land where I was born.

When I was six years old, my parents, with their hearts on fire for Jesus, left Seoul and moved to Nairobi, Kenya, as missionaries. That move changed my life forever. What roots I may have set down in South Korea were severed, and I was transplanted in a land far from my birth place. The location on the equator made the very air I breathed feel different. The sun felt stronger there. The sky felt so close because the clouds always looked heavy enough to descend to my level. The change in landscape and environment felt so visceral, my body reacted by getting quite sick.

My parents sent me to a British school where I was immersed in the English language and the writings of British authors. This was yet another displacement, to be educated into a British perspective and history while living in Kenya.

This time in my life was the beginning of hearing certain words used by others to describe me. Words that supposedly summed me up. Words that felt restrictive, confining, othering. In Nairobi, I was forever mzungu. In Korea, I was gyopo. In America, I am immigrant, minority. I have been called many other names, too, some derogatory. These are different languages, different contexts, but they all share the same qualities. These words don’t communicate anything about the journey I have been on. They don’t communicate whether I had a say in the matter of my status. They simply convey my status of perceived unbelonging.

In order to survive, I had to create a world where I belonged. I escaped through reading and drawing. The images in my head and the stories I dreamt up were places where I belonged, where the demands of different races, cultures, traditions, languages had equal weight, instead of one being more important than another.

And so I have gravitated to abstraction. In abstraction, I am free from the restraints of location and subject matter. I can exist solely in the world of color, infusing it with my own memories, but leaving it open to interpretations.