The theme that integrates my solo projects with collaborative projects is the theme of boundary. I have addressed creative discourses on issues of blurred boundaries not just in the geographical sense, but also in the virtual and physical sense. My creative works explore the blurred boundaries of today’s nomadic life style. Today’s nomadism is not that of unrestricted wandering; it is based on a global nomadic culture. Our nomadic lifestyle redefines the meaning of ‘home’ as something that one may carry only in one’s mind or in one’s own character. In addition, our experiences are now multi-cultural, transcending geographic locations and the ethnic characteristics of our living environments.

     As a culturally displaced artist, I have been drawn to the theme of cultural displacement and identity, and to social psychological and cross-cultural studies that are heavily influenced by immigrant experiences and by the interaction between people and space. My most recent projects have adopted a documentary approach and artistic archives to present my experiences of dislocation and rootlessness in our contemporary nomadic culture.

     My projects seek to answer three questions:

     1. How do my physical and psychological experiences of displacement affect and express a sense of identity in my works?

     My sense of identity has been formed fundamentally by my relationship to specific places, histories, and cultures that embody my roots. Shifts in geographies and in my emotional, cultural, and educational experiences have influenced and reshaped that sense of identity. As I continue to attempt to position myself in different societies, real and virtual, my most striking observation is the fluidity of identity, unfixed, open, and not subordinate to any specific society.

     My series Drinking Your Surroundings (2004~ongoing) comprises about three hundred digital pigment prints that represent the places I have lived in and visited over the past eight years. These works embody my desire to come to terms with my origins and to create an artistic archive of my cultural displacement and the attendant sense of instability and sense of alienation. Since 2004, I have been collecting images of my different surroundings and arranging them, per place, within the water glass that I drink from every day, in order to absorb that place visually and conceptually. These “portraits” of place convey my thoughts and feelings about the places where I have not constructed an identity and therefore am unable to retrieve spatial memories and stories.

     2. How do I express my Korean regionality in a global community?

     The subject of cultural differences has been depicted by immigrant artists and can be an advantage in the contemporary art scene, because cultural differences often bring uniqueness to their artworks. However, it is important to convey one’s regional uniqueness such that viewers from other cultures can engage meaningfully with the artworks. An artwork presenting a distinct local visual aesthetic, made in a traditional local medium, risks becoming a regional cliché. My most critical task as a culturally displaced artist in America is to express with a more global approach while successfully retaining my Korean sensibility in my work.

     My Skyscape (2011) series employs acrylic painting on digital pigment print and was heavily influenced by my experience of applying for permanent residency in the United States. The works present landscape scenes created by my scanned black-and-white fingerprints and floating international airplanes painted, with a photorealistic approach, on top of the print. The fingerprints echo the styles and imageries of Korean traditional ink painting called sumukhwa. My adapted, minimalist form creates various shades of black and remains emotionally calm—conveying my attempt to present my identity in a global nomadic culture, symbolized by the airplanes. While my methods of expression reflect Asian regionality (local), the conceptual content of these artworks intentionally speak to and for a wider (global) audience.

     3. How do I apply collecting as an artistic action in my work?

     Act of collecting is a way to document and archive an individual’s history, memories, and tastes. In addition to this definition, I believe that the act of collecting has more creative process of artistic action rather than simply documenting and preserving objects. Further, the act of collecting beyond its connotation as a personal pastime can provide the significant role of reflecting the social and historical index of our society. Collections selected by artistic decisions could encourage the viewers to meditate on the meaning of the trivial round of daily life and the sense of time flow. Therefore, I expand the private (personal) act of collecting to public exhibition spaces in order to share my collective experiences with others.

     Much of my artmaking incorporates a documentary approach within the act of collecting. For example, the photography project Drinking Your Surroundings consists of over three hundred images of cups. My current project, Mini Home, is a collection of about four hundred fifty virtual homes with avatars personalized by users on Cyworld, Korea’s most popular social networking site. I intend to show how people reflect, in their virtual homes, the lives and homes that they have in the real world.

     I am looking forward to developing my creative works with new materials and directions to investigate the broader scopes of boundary, including inter-temporal and inter-generational issues. In particular, I will seek answers to the following new question: How does my sense of identity transform or re-form as I live in different time and locations? In addition, I will apply performative approaches to my new projects to make the process of artmaking a significant element of the projects.