STATEMENT

My most recent body of work consists of drawings made with my own hair on Korean mulberry paper. The geometric shapes of the drawings have a resonance with the abstract ideas I am focused on, and the process, which is concentration-intensive and time consuming, sets up a vehicle for self-reflection.

I am interested in everyday contemporary life. Learning about new definitions of what life means today for me is part of the process of my artwork. The images that I make are mostly representing my way of understanding and translating those thought processes.

After getting married, my husband and I moved to Virginia where we are surrounded by nature. I started gardening for the first time in my life and was amazed that a tiny dot like a seed becomes the miracle of nature. Since I am always wondering about life, here was the perfect teacher and an example of the whole process. For me, it was really natural to begin using the hair which had belonged to me and once it falls off it becomes a different substance itself. My hair was the section of my body that was the perfect example of the circle of nature which has a sense of history and relationships.

The first piece I started in my new studio was Expanding, which starts at the center of the paper to draw a perfect expanding spiral from a single line of individual hairs connected end-to-end. As it is, the whole process of making it, which took about four months, is the substance where I found the beauty and sublime. The form and direction of the drawing perhaps relate to my situation, for the first time living outside of the city and away from human contact. Without a drivers license and with my husband at work, it necessitated a certain patience and sacrifice of my desire for activity until our situation could change. It was at first like living in a beautiful prison, but beautiful things were happening around me. I related the power or essence of the circle of nature to a small section of the body.

In a way, the isolation was natural in relation to my environment growing up. I came from the small city of Kwang-Ju in Southern Korea, which throughout its history has been distanced from other cities and peoples by political influences. I was influenced by the tension, contrast, and complexity in the air just being there as I grew up. For me, it was very natural being isolated from society and other expectations. While I didn’t enjoy the patterns of life such as school, home, expectations, and others, I was always finding the happiness within me wandering the world with unlimited imagination, my own way of curiosity and finding the answers.

By using my own hair in my work I begin to realize that I try to make a connection between the past and the future. My training in Korea was in traditional Korean art, which I studied at Chunnam University, one of the most prestigious art school in the country. The concentrated study of traditional painting was very intense, and I credit that training with my being very particular about choosing a visual vocabulary today. It was in graduate school here at MICA that I began using the mulberry paper in a contemporary manner. Appreciation of the process and craft of the papermaking process is connected with my focus on process in making my own work.

The process itself is a big part of the concept of my work, which is why I chose the simple way drawing the line. There is complexity in a simple life. In the work Extensions each line is each individual lives which never stop going, the continuation of history. I learn that my existence is just a small part of the huge machine. This work took about five months to complete. Each morning brushing my hair produced enough loose strands for that days work. I began by aligning vertical strands of hair right next to each other all the way across the top of the paper. Then another row was added by extending each vertical line with another hair placed at its end, and repeated until the entire sheet was filled.

The most significant shaped piece is Ring, which is very personal in a way that the ring itself is a symbolic idea which depicts the sense of relationships. Not only man and woman, but also relation between myself and nature, the people and the whole world, the God and the human nature of rules. We like to make statement or promise the notion of understanding. But the relationships between affinity and resistance and between harmony and chaos are constantly changing. The art making process is like a never-ending story in which the work produced reflects the artist’s life at that time. As I am always pondering, it is like a chain where the questions and answers continually create more questions and answers.