As a Korean-American immigrant artist navigating displacement, I explore the themes of family, identity, and resilience in my art. After graduate school (2003), my work began with portrait drawings and abstract expressions based on nature. My portraits focused on satirical and topical paintings, sculptures, and experiential mediums through a synthesis of society, sex, and commercial advertising. These topics began my journey into mixed media. 

I continued to work on portraits of myself, my family, and immigrant families within my communities. Based on the subject's occupation, religion, and family relationships, I expressed the process of settling in the United States as immigrants. My oil painting works used mixed media and materials with various textures to create three dimensional portraits. Extrusions, depth, and textures are projections of my thoughts of immigration onto another, thoughts of wandering, isolation, and cultural maladaptation contrasting with the image of stability. 

In addition to portraits, my abstract works based on nature also expressed the similar sentiment of not being able to settle down in an unfamiliar land. In retrospect, I projected my unsettled feelings of an immigrant onto subjects and abstract landscapes. I rejected to capture the joys that were to be a part of a family, the pride of self identification, and the charms of nature. 

In 2022, I became interested in community engagement with the local community people. Currently, in addition to my studio work, I visit areas and communities of people who have difficulty accessing art culture, especially immigrants and people of color, and create collective art with them. 

At this point in my career, I plan to continue working to develop my artistic process beyond the expression of one individual's life and to empower local communities and the immigrant societies of both my and the next generation.