I am a 22-year old Korean American artist based in Los Angeles.
Following a lineage of feminist artists, I step into my own frame, use flesh as a medium, and belligerently question the biopolitical landscape that subsumes my being. Interrogating contemporary notions of racial, sexual, and gender identity through a surrogate self, I identify the ways I both internalize and transgress the social expectations imposed on me. While my investigation begins with deconstructing stereotypes of the Asian bottom–which symbolically castrates “yellow” bodies and eliminates their sexual agency–I expand outwards to analyze the plasticity of gender, uneven distributions of phallic power, and queer forms of Asian-American inscrutability.
Lauren Elkin in the text Art Monsters states, “those who are in power don’t need the I; they speak from a position of universality. But for the dominated, the marginal, the monstrous, there is no choice but to speak in the first person.” My transdisciplinary practice pushes the boundaries of the “I” as I develop an understanding of self that defies dogma. Drawing inspiration from comic panels and exquisite corpse exercises, my paintings Frankenstein heads, torsos, and limbs together, ultimately revealing alternative ways to achieve bodily and psychic autonomy. I imagine these monsters as carnivalesque, performing on a stage, using gender and sexuality as props, and exposing the armature behind the West’s biopolitical regime,
Contemplating the flatness of stereotypes, which reduce me to a yellow, gay, bottom, I visually and physically explore such flatness throughout my work–whether it be through a cartoon double of myself or thin material of wearable sculpture. I toy between rejecting and accepting this state of being while finding the power within flat spaces to reconfigure myself against a limitless plane of existence; no longer bound by the laws of physics, my cartoon character exists in a world of ever-expanding potentiality. Enamored by the resilience of cartoon characters to endure unimaginable pain–falling off cliffs, breaking through walls, and stretching like puddy–I empower my cartoon double to adopt such plasticity.
Influenced by Paul B. Preciado’s Countersexual Manifesto, my work conjures phallic power beyond the penis and extends it to fingers, arms, legs, and more. Through this redistribution of power, I deteriorate binarist limitations by removing the phallus from solely cismale ownership and sharing it with everyone. Coupling Preciado’s ideas with William Pope.L’s Hole Theory–which confronts the “lacking” within physical, psychic, and cultural space as a means of empowerment–I look towards my own pores and orifices as a sight of liberation. Instead of rejecting bottomhood, I leverage the power of holes to transport, consume, and digest, thus reframing the act of receiving as active rather than passive. Employing auto penetration and self-consumption as conceptual tools, I embody positions of the top and the bottom–penetrator and receiver–simultaneously, further complicating and erasing such dichotomies.
Following a lineage of feminist artists, I step into my own frame, use flesh as a medium, and belligerently question the biopolitical landscape that subsumes my being. Interrogating contemporary notions of racial, sexual, and gender identity through a surrogate self, I identify the ways I both internalize and transgress the social expectations imposed on me. While my investigation begins with deconstructing stereotypes of the Asian bottom–which symbolically castrates “yellow” bodies and eliminates their sexual agency–I expand outwards to analyze the plasticity of gender, uneven distributions of phallic power, and queer forms of Asian-American inscrutability.
Lauren Elkin in the text Art Monsters states, “those who are in power don’t need the I; they speak from a position of universality. But for the dominated, the marginal, the monstrous, there is no choice but to speak in the first person.” My transdisciplinary practice pushes the boundaries of the “I” as I develop an understanding of self that defies dogma. Drawing inspiration from comic panels and exquisite corpse exercises, my paintings Frankenstein heads, torsos, and limbs together, ultimately revealing alternative ways to achieve bodily and psychic autonomy. I imagine these monsters as carnivalesque, performing on a stage, using gender and sexuality as props, and exposing the armature behind the West’s biopolitical regime,
Contemplating the flatness of stereotypes, which reduce me to a yellow, gay, bottom, I visually and physically explore such flatness throughout my work–whether it be through a cartoon double of myself or thin material of wearable sculpture. I toy between rejecting and accepting this state of being while finding the power within flat spaces to reconfigure myself against a limitless plane of existence; no longer bound by the laws of physics, my cartoon character exists in a world of ever-expanding potentiality. Enamored by the resilience of cartoon characters to endure unimaginable pain–falling off cliffs, breaking through walls, and stretching like puddy–I empower my cartoon double to adopt such plasticity.
Influenced by Paul B. Preciado’s Countersexual Manifesto, my work conjures phallic power beyond the penis and extends it to fingers, arms, legs, and more. Through this redistribution of power, I deteriorate binarist limitations by removing the phallus from solely cismale ownership and sharing it with everyone. Coupling Preciado’s ideas with William Pope.L’s Hole Theory–which confronts the “lacking” within physical, psychic, and cultural space as a means of empowerment–I look towards my own pores and orifices as a sight of liberation. Instead of rejecting bottomhood, I leverage the power of holes to transport, consume, and digest, thus reframing the act of receiving as active rather than passive. Employing auto penetration and self-consumption as conceptual tools, I embody positions of the top and the bottom–penetrator and receiver–simultaneously, further complicating and erasing such dichotomies.