On Witnessing & Reflection
As a Reflector—one who mirrors and samples the environment—my practice
doesn't claim ownership of these stories; rather, it witnesses them.
I hold space for the collective processing of transnational migration's impact,
recognizing that my own experience is inseparable from systemic structures
of empire, war, and cultural erasure.
The work requires lunar time.
I don't force rapid production but allow pieces to emerge through accumulated daily practices: tea rituals extending across months, fasting sessions that quiet conscious control, burnishing that numbers in the hundreds.
This temporal approach honors Indigenous and Korean concepts of time as cyclical
rather than linear, healing as generational rather than individual.
Materials become collaborators.
Hair knows things the mind doesn't. Shells hold ocean memory.
Beeswax preserves what paper alone cannot.
By working with substances that carry biological and elemental intelligence,
the work accesses knowledge beyond trauma narratives—knowledge of survival, adaptation, and the body's insistence on continuing despite fracture.
I am not trying to answer questions.
I am trying to hold them well enough that others can approach them differently.
Land Acknowledgment:
I acknowledge that my studio sits on the ancestral homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations.
This land was never ceded and remains Indigenous land. I recognize the ongoing violence of settler colonialism and its direct relationship
to the adoption systems that displaced me from Korea. Making art on stolen land while addressing my own displacement requires accountability
to the continued presence and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples.