Introduction

Thanks for coming by!

I am a Korean diaspora artist/researcher based in London. Holding a PhD in human geography that intersects feminist geography with queer theories, my practice expands on our relationships with places and ecosystems affected by the systematic exploitation of neo-colonial operations. I am particularly interested in political spirituality, exploring intimate aesthetics of solidarity building and collective healing. 

My early practice in Korea took off with a series of works that involved working-class women, provoking conversations around the extractive value system of human labour. My first commission Nameless Name interrogates a social inquiry – Why manual labourers are never given a business card compared to office workers, involving the lived experiences of middle-aged women working in the food factory. The research-based public art project Guro Gongdan 19662013 explores the legacy of the Guro industrial complex in Seoul based on three themes – migration, young factory workers’ culture, and the labour movement. This project also culminated in my first solo exhibition Bacchus Economics. It looked into the political-economic subjectivity of young female factory workers in 1970s Korea under the dictatorship government that underpinned institutionalised labour abuse for accelerating export.  

Since settling in London in 2014, my interrogation of labour exploitation has expanded to the neo-colonial context through the lens of migrant workers and climate justice. Emperor’s Jade Rabbit weaves post-colonial capitalism through the recounts of migrant cleaners in Britain, interlacing with the immortal Moon Rabbit mythology and Western superstitions/witchcraft around a broom. During the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, I wrote and performed Unapologetic Coughing as an urgent response to the spike of anti-Asian racism and to create an intimate space for collective healing and solidarity. It instructs the audience to express their emotional and psychological discomfort with the psychogenic cough while depicting the violence of nationalism, abuse of precarious workers and environmental damage as the real cause of a new virus spillage. 

Grief has been the focus of my recent practice, posing collective grief as the process of socio-political autopsy upon certain types of death and environmental destruction. Not This Future (2020), commemorating the Essex 39 incident rooted in the Formosa Disaster; Book of Loss (2022), intervention performance grieving seven lost glaciers; In Every Bite of the Emperor (2021-ongoing/long-term), the transnational weaving of neo-colonial narratives around damaged ecosystems and broken communities are in tandem with this inquiry. As an extension of the ecological grief project, I have been exploring the idea of eco-literacy, attempting to overcome anthropocentric intelligence, and the concept of a living memorial, engaging the interspecies collaboration in commemoration making as the counter to the human-centred didactic phallic sculptural forms.    

I have been actively taking part in collaborative practices and collectivising. As a diaspora artist, I found collaboration is the most ethical and possible way to survive in the precarious working conditions of the art sector. Not to mention emancipatory joy and power in working with the like-minded. I co-founded the research-practice working group Decolonising Botany and am part of the collectives – Breakwater, Have You Eaten Yet? and Studio YEA.  

Various institutions have supported my work. Amongst them are Arts Catalyst, Asia-Art-Activism, Barbican Centre, Camden Arts Centre, Coventry Biennial 2021, Estuary Festival, FACT Liverpool, Flat Time House, GOSH Arts, Heart of Glass, Liverpool Biennial 2021, Milton Keynes Arts Centre, Milton Keynes Islamic Arts and Culture, Nottingham Contemporary, S1 Artspace, Up Projects in the UK; ARKO Art Center, Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2023, Seoul Museum of Art, The Book Society in Korea; Documenta 15, Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz in Germany; British Council, Gerimis in Malaysia; and Nextdoor ARI in Australia.