About
I paint people in acrylic — faces, figures, and the characters that kept me company growing up.
I was born in Korea in 1982 and spent my childhood moving from school to school. In 1997 my family left for the United States, and I finished high school and college there, earning my BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2011. That same year I returned to Korea.
Arriving in a new country as a teenager, with a new language and a new culture, television, animation, and cartoons were often my closest friends. Drawing them, and eventually the people around me, became the way I made sense of where I was — and it still is.
Today I work a full-time job to support my family, and I am still figuring out how to make room for painting. That tension between two lives is where my work begins.
Exhibitions
Group Exhibition, Gallery Eun, organized by LART — February 12–17, 2025
Education
BFA, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY — 2011
Artist Statement
What I see becomes who I am.
I moved so often as a child that I learned to become a new person at every school. When I arrived in the United States at fifteen, I became someone else again, and when I returned to Korea fourteen years later, someone else once more. Each move rewrote me, and somewhere between all those versions I lost track of the original. Even now I do not feel quite like myself — but I have come to see that feeling not as a problem to solve, but as the place my work comes from.
That is why I paint people. A face is where identity is most visible and most unstable: the same person can look like a stranger depending on where they stand and who is looking. The cartoon characters that kept me company when language failed me still surface in my work, a visual language I carried with me through every move.
My days now are shaped by repetition and quiet compromise — working to support my family, accepting others, and setting my own desires aside to fit in. Rather than escaping that life, I use it. The friction between who I am expected to be and who I want to be is the energy behind every piece I make.
I believe that one day art will bring me back to myself.