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Senior Thesis Exhibition
2022
Abeyaz Amir
Chia Amisola
Brice Bai
Merritt Barnwell
Onora Best
Maya Boateng
Ekow Buadu
Anne Chen
Mila Colizza
Alara Degirmenci
Ivory Fu
Pilar Galvan
Matt Herriot
Sidney Hirschman
Neo Khan
Daniel Kyungjae Lee
Sunnie Liu
Laura Padilla Castellanos
Anya Pertel
Sarah Saltzman
Sol Thompson
Julie Tran
Aliaksandra Tucha
Sofia Turner
Xavier
Jieun Yu
For my thesis, I am trying to comprehend how the legacy of colonialism has shaped our desires, for flesh, greed and war. I am creating an enclosed club space as a means of placing colonial history in the context of freedom: who is allowed to dance, party, and be free? What are the spiritual and mateiral motivations/conflicts that influince our desires for sex, libations and money? How has the course of history shaped our material and bodily needs? The enclosed space houses a mural with three figures whose composition is split with flourescent color highlighting a duality of intention/emotion as they create the club scene. UV and RGB lights flash to a mix of house music centered around the theme of political empowerment and sexual liberation. House music has been used ascross the world in modern day protests against totalitiarian and imperial powers in Columbia, Lebanon, and more. The mural will visually change as the lights change and paint interacts with the lights, highlighting different motifs and figures depending on the beat.
Engine.lol is a gamemaker that is a game in itself. An ode to the early, handmade web and to toolmaking, it’s creation that inspires creation—as only the human invents tools to make other tools and has always used its own artifacts to reinvent itself. ‘Games’ are spatial and non-linear, navigated using a grid system assembled out of images, text, and original tracks. Every story made with the tool can be remixed, played, and published. The system itself is offline, built without reliance on depreciable software and is reproduced on analog media: flash drives, CD, & floppy discs; its soundtrack on cassette. A ‘tutorial’ system guides the user, providing a controlling or comforting narrative voice depending on the user’s actions. As the user tells its stories, the tool tells you some of its own, as well. The internet is rife with contradictions: how do we have the most advanced technology we’ve ever had, yet struggle with authorship and distribution? We ignore the physicality of the internet and its reliance on massive networks of physical infrastructure, yet lean into how it renders spatial difference irrelevant whenever we type in a URL. We digitize our memories and treat the internet as a permanent archive, though the loss of massive tools and software like Myspace and Macromedia Flash have lost uncountable stories, audio, and games. In display with a replica of the artist’s bedroom with parodies of retro tech ads, it’s also an exercise in worldbuilding and the culture that surrounds craft.
People’s perceptions of and ability to interact with their environment, whether physical or virtual, are not universally the same. My work explores finding connections amongst those differences and creating new experiences from them. It analyzes how people navigate the world according to its various interfaces, playing close attention to the ways that design impacts an individual’s experience. For the past year, my thesis has been an exploration of navigating the built virtual environment. I examined accessibility in virtual reality (VR) by utilizing the wheelchair as its new concrete interface. Being part of the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media’s (CCAM) Wheelchair Interface Project, my thesis contributes to their ongoing investigation of how wheelchair-bound users explore virtual worlds and why their experience calls for a new interactive interface that will improve experiences not only for them, but for all VR users. I created and 3D-modeled a design system that follows Americans with Disabilities Act regulations for a modular-unit-based playground. I took these units to develop the playscape in Unity with the rapid prototyping tool, the Verb Collective. The culmination of my designs is the experience one has navigating through this interactive VR playground in the wheelchair. It reimagines what mobility, accessibility, and delightful engagement in VR looks like for anyone.
I am primarily a figurative artist. Either consciously or subconsciously, my art focuses and draws inspiration from the body. The underlying thread that runs through my work is an exploration of the dynamic spaces bodies create. I started as a hyper-realist painter focusing on capturing the exact likeness of my subjects, but found myself fascinated by the structures and, indeed, architectural forms that are created through the interaction of bodies. In addition, my practice attempts to question traditional ideas around portraiture through the exploration and intersection of different mediums including oil painting, printmaking, and wood-working. For my thesis, I have built a wooden dining-room table that represents a body. The dining room table has always been a difficult place for me and is a site where I believe social expectations are shaped and enforced. It is a site of communion, where people converse, eat meals, and celebrate special occasions, but it can also be where gender roles are enforced, where labor inequality is enacted, where people are silenced, and where power dynamics are tangible. For me, the table also represents a complicated state of womanhood on a very personal level that grapples with domestic labor, objectification, and the ability to have control over one’s own body. I wanted to attempt to convey the build up of memory and trauma of these moments and how this would appear through an anthropomorphized piece of furniture. I purchased a used table and constructed a wooden frame to completely cover it, creating a mosaic of different woods and grain qualities. I used my own body as a reference and carved the figurative shape that covers the table, with the goal of creating a piece of furniture that is a living body that remembers all that takes place around it. The table underneath remains intact and purposely untouched and protected, while its outer shell suffers from external decay. I have poured an accumulation of wood chips, spices, coffee, and melted sugar into the cracks and impurities of the wood, to resemble sap or scar tissue patching and covering wounds in order to signify memory and healing. There is also shellac weeping out of the cracks as well, mimicking water damage but also conveys the table’s emotional state. The surface has been sanded and carved to expose the strained muscles of the table’s form and to illustrate decay and wear over time.
The original plan for my thesis was a series of oil paintings focusing on the imagery of bones and flowers. This was a chance to explore various ways to render this subject matter and experiment with a more textured style of painting. Over the course of the year, the series evolved into a collection in several respects. The end product is quite literally a collection of paintings, prints, and drawings. The scale shifts within the set invite the viewer to engage with the work more intimately and consider how each piece is not only a representation of some item not currently present, but also a collectible object on its own. But the series is also a collection of deeper meanings, self reflections, and personal associations. I grew sunflowers in my front yard from scratch when I was twelve, and there's been a patch of lavender growing next to my grandmother's front door for as long as I can remember. Paintings of skulls recall the tradition of vanitas still life, which serve as a reminder of mortality and the eventual victory of death over every living thing. The history of flower language gives symbolism to every flower, like the wonder and enchantment of lavender colored roses or the patience, prosperity, and good fortune of alliums.
i can't dance, but i've always been a lover of dance films. this piece can be understood as my way of living vicariously through all of the ballet dancers that i so love to watch in an a portable, immersive, mutable medium. none of this is random. everything on the screen is constructed, built, scripted to be there, whether directed by a python algorithm that i've written or based on the analysis data that the spotify api has fed to me. it's a performance. in this world, music and shape and color and light appear to be suspended in space. all digital spaces are connected to physical ones.
My artwork depicts somewhat of a dreamcatcher-like shrine of ancestral spiritual protection and memory that is intended to reflect the meditative practices I’ve engaged in in the past few months to help navigate my own anxiety and ADHD. The grunge-style mini posters at each corner many with darker or visually distorted backgrounds are meant to also imitate what one might ‘see’ beneath closed eyes or even a different visual spectrum in this sort of context. The video on the computer screen with the 80s and 90s commercials juxtaposed with more modern images and GIFs also represents the parallels between generational and societal learning that can occur and therefore unlearning that sometimes must take place when confronting the stories one may absorb unconsciously when caught in between two worlds. I encountered this experience in college as both a black person trying to achieve success in predominantly white spaces and a child of African immigrants from a culturally-rich background but also with contrasting social experiences and sometimes conflicting perspectives. The goal of the video is to simulate the resolution of the traditional and communal with the individual and modern, or in the case of ADHD accepting the part of oneself that values discipline and peace with the part that can also fluctuate or be somewhat impulsive and chaotic (inner child). The final feature are the Adinkra, or traditional Ghanaian symbols between each two posters that mean Unity, the Supremacy of God, Energy, and Forgiveness, respectively, again representing the resolution between the traditional and unconventional parts of oneself to achieve growth and happiness in life. The symbols also appear in the video as coded “mazes” the viewer can see the 2D and 3D perspective of navigating in between the images and cards appearing on screen.
A little about me: I was born and raised in Queens. I love exploring street food fairs during humid summer nights. I’m a sucker for reality TV shows like Survivor, 90 Day Fiance, and Masterchef Australia—they introduce spice into my unremarkable life. I’m also a veteran of horror/thriller movies due to my older brother’s sadist (just kidding) tendencies (he made me watch Shutter and Ringu when I was 8). I also love watching anime and Korean dramas. However, something that's always been true no matter how much my perspective and personality has fluxed over the years is that I've always loved reading books. When I was younger, I was always holed up in the local library in my favorite corner reading away late fees—I would devour poetry, YA fantasy novels, comic books, etc. Later on, when I began experimenting with different art mediums, I realized that while I don't enjoy placing people in my art pieces and could never capture the nuances of what made them special to me, people were always at the heart of my writing. Perhaps that's why I gravitated to graphic design, or more specifically typesetting literature. People change day by day, but books don't: whatever the author felt writing that specific line or choosing a word that rolled on the tongue just right is forever permanent within four borders. Books are like a hometown for the soul—it’s not about where we are from, but where our hearts long for. Using typography with intentionality allows me to attempt to capture that sweet nostalgia and whimsy and allow people to experience the author's writing in refreshing new ways that go beyond text plainly set left aligned with a loose rag.
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I believe in the power of intentional design in sparking conversations, inspiring action, and influencing decisions. My designs are driven by intent and informed by a culmination of research, close-looking, listening, seeing, and reflecting. My work is often multi-layered, involving different pieces and narratives unified by a central theme. My thesis, “Psychogeographies” is composed of a series of posters, zines, and an interactive installation that explore and celebrate my and my friends’ experiences in relation to Yale’s campus over the past four years. We are used to seeing maps that depict scientific and factual information, which often fails to capture the humanity of everyday life. My design methodology uses anonymously sourced data to visualize a narrative of emotions and experiences of both personal and collective nature. It is an attempt to visualize the often unseen information and aims to demonstrate how mapping can be used to bring depth and meaning to places through portraying emotions, memory, sensation, and imagination. The resulting maps aim to spark moments of reflection rather than convey scientifically accurate information. In other words, it can be considered an ongoing attempt to create emotional portraits of a city with the hope of making the viewers reflect on their time in relation to time and place.
I don’t apologize for saying things directly. I just care about you. And I care deeply about the people in my life, because their tears challenge me and their hugs are tender. They even allow me to get bored of them sometimes, and that’s a grace that we share, an understanding that we are understood and will return to each other. My art is about them, and by reflection, me and you. My studio practice is sustainable because my rage, happiness, gratitude, confusion, and their cycles keep me grounded. I joke about being a nihilist. But I’m just masochistic, only in a selfish, not self-sacrificial, way. I push to the boiling point so I can live longer. I’ve embraced the fact that I dwell: I throw things into chaos but draw them back and dissect how that whole mess made me feel. My art is queer and colorful. I had been fighting the colors for too long, and I’m glad I can now see them against these pockmarked white gallery walls and be proud of my (mostly) non-restraint. I like to get political, because I care about the personal, and I don’t want people to dictate the way you move through the world. I’ve been told that I have a large appetite. I see it as having a short attention span. You can decide which frame you prefer! A tl;dr list of influences would be: Ann Hamilton, Elle Perez, Pierre Bonnard, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Reverend Goddess Magora Kennedy, Cole Lu, Egon Schiele, Giacometti, Ernesto Neto, Eikoh Hosoe and everyone else in my archive of artists and thinkers. The bottom line is, we don’t have the luxury of shame. I’ve moved beyond hyperrealistic, explicitly-biological works, but I still relate to the body: yours and mine. I’m talking about queerness, intergenerational trauma, identity formation, denial, binding as restrictive and (gender-, medically-) affirming, family, honest and dishonest hugs, and suffocating maternal love. I want to draw us closer through figurative forms and trippy paint.
Walking through my grandmother's house was like entering a portal. There was a wall tiled in mirrors, tables with plastic tablecloths, wigs hanging from a shoe rack, an old wooden console piano, a living room carpeted in sandy beige and a kitchen with black and white tile floors. A display cabinet of untouched china lined the dining room wall, Folgers coffee and cans of Canada Dry were piled amongst scrabble, and dried floral arrangements filled every vase. This was my wonderland, a reality that felt like a dream. I wanted to recreate that space in my work. I found a home that was reminiscent of that space and invited a group of six women who I barely knew to come together in a “Historic Mansion” in New Haven. The mansion is owned by an elderly Italian couple, the wife is an artist and dollmaker and the house is adorned with her work. The space had a charmingly eclectic aesthetic just like that of my grandmother's home. The space was characterized by a twinge of faux extravagance, fake flowers, thick patterned armchairs, and ornate carpeting and light fixtures. I wanted the space to be a retreat for the women I included. I chose to photograph them as themselves, wearing thrifted and vintage attire from a slew of decades, exploring the space. The piece revolves around this Black domestic space and how Black women protect and perform within it. Whether it be by covering furniture in plastic or putting thrift store table ware in glass casing. These practices are metaphors for the way Black women move through the world. Beyond that there are symbols of their ingenuity. Both the ironing board (the one in the piece is my mother’s and is worn with age) and the clothing line (which holds the colonial style curtains setting the stage) were invented by Black women. Their contributions to society are embedded in the home and forms of expression. Layered under and onto the images of these women within this space are archival images of the women in my mothers family. I use cyanotype to create a sort of afterimage of my great grandmother whom I am named after. I believe that her legacy lives on within me. The bleeding and imperfection of the print further illustrates the tension of striving for an ideal (hard edges of the transferred images) but finding rarity in uninhibited expression. The sense of escape into this expression is emphasized by the image of the beauty supply store leading into an oasis. Which is overlaid with a video of the women who were in the shoot walking down/towards the aisle and disappearing. The audio which plays subverts the white fragility which is weaponized against Black women in order to prevent them from claiming their femininity. The women recite and reconstruct interviews that were conducted with white women (predominantly those in sororities) on how they see themselves. In doing so, the Black women who were featured subvert and reclaim space which despite their influence seems to never have had space for them
I am fascinated by our ability to decipher representation from even the most abstract of visual cues. I am also fascinated by paintings that capture the appearances of complex objects and settings by abbreviating them into a limited number of gestures. To demonstrate this inevitable coexistence of abstraction and representation, I paint my studio. My working process is concentrated entirely on answering two questions: “Which of my observations of my surroundings should I record, and how should I use paint to record them?” Simply changing these two variables allows me to look at the same view of my studio time and time again, yet each time produce an entirely new painting—defined not by the specific view of my studio it represents but by the unique arrangements of paint and color that simultaneously give rise to that representation and diverge from it into abstraction. Only I am able to perceive some of the abstractions in my paintings as depictions of my studio because of my familiarity with the space and my experience of making the paintings. However, by painting the same scene multiple times, my intention is for viewers to begin to see the paintings in the same way that I do, whereby previously indecipherable collections of brushstrokes become recognizable as specific objects or features of my studio. This occurs due to correspondences between different abstractions across multiple paintings that stand to represent the same object. Therefore, viewing multiple paintings in sequence is designed to heighten one’s attention to the nuances of each.
Wednesday, March 23, 2022 11:48 pm New Haven, CT I was tonight about to begin the process of printing out large press sheets for my book on the Vandercook, a step that comes after months of planning and typesetting, when the ink distribution motor gave out on me. Now, at nearly midnight, sitting covered in grease and ink at this impasse in my project, seems a good a time as ever to write my statement. The book itself is not the whole of the art. Certainly, it is the work, or some part of it, but the art — my thesis — is a celebration of printing through its practice. It is the time I spend in the Press sorting thin spaces so students can have an easier time of typesetting; it is the energy that comes to me suddenly, miraculously, when someone needs help printing, even when I am bone-tired. It is the tympan sheet, accidentally printed on over and over again, bearing witness to dozens of projects at a time. It is ruining my favorite pair of pants with grease stains climbing halfway into the Vandercook to get a better view of the stalled drive shaft. It is all the art, and it is all the work, the joyful stewardship of an ancient process in an impossible place, and if it produces a little book of poetry that is nice to hold and look at and read, then that is all the better. I am not worried, now — odd, because it’s in my nature to worry, and something has indeed gone majorly wrong only weeks away from the show. But I am on solid ground. I feel safe in here. Perhaps more than at any other time in this process, I am assured things will turn out — they always do. I love the Press. I think the Press loves me.
During my time at Yale, I’ve been exploring the intersection of art and technology, exploring the limits of web technologies as it pertains to creating artistic renditions and interpretations of the various corners of the Internet. I’ve created work that satirizes and comments on Internet culture such as the “foodie” culture, work that reimagines time, and even work that just simply looks cool. My current project, the “Spotify Web Visualizer” (No, it is not sponsored and has no affiliation with Spotify unfortunately, and yes, I will be working on a newer, cooler name for it), is another product of my adventure into the crazy universe that is the Internet. Most digital artwork seen on the web have been created by users and artists, so my new project instead has a computer making the art rather than a human being. The “Spotify Web Visualizer” is a web app that people can use to select songs from Spotify’s database, upon which the application itself will take the song and data from Spotify’s music analysis machine to create and render a 2-dimensional collage animation, playing with different shaped figures, images, colors, etc. Each rendition of a song will vary, creating a new and unique experience every time a song is played. The question, “can computers do what humans can?”, is the main focus of this experiment as the computer is attempting to create art, a form of expression that has been unique to humans for centuries. Who knows, maybe computers really will be able to imitate humans in the future or maybe I made this project just so I don’t have to make art myself.
I give these earnest toasts again—cliché as they may be—in honor of all who got drunk and shared an honest moment, back into the often hopeless void of being young in 2022. These toasts may not have solved any the fears or granted any wishes, but I hope they might echo within those who happen to come by. Cheers! 짠!
I grew up in a Baptist Church founded and led by white Texans – including the politician whom the press called the Texas Congress’s "most flamingly red member" – as a domestic missionary project to evangelize working-class Chinese migrants, including my family. Without a public safety net, low-income migrants like us turned to the church for free food, childcare, ESL lessons, and other social services. Adopting a Freirean pedagogy, my white Bible Study teachers aimed to “save” not only our souls by preaching Christianity, but also our minds by internalizing capitalistic, cis-gendered, heteronormative, white male hegemony in us. To this day, I am the only family member to have left this church and its right-wing politics. My thesis centers on this church as a site to critique imperialism, the religious right, and the myth of American meritocracy. To immerse viewers in my experiences, I serve them communion of Dr. Pepper and invite them to sit on handmade floor pillows between figures wearing my dad’s, my mom’s, and my baptismal robes and submerged in Dr. Pepper, red wine, and English tea. Together, the viewers and figures can pray before the altar on a handmade tablecloth wrapped in protective plastic, listen to my readings of the Evidence Bible, and watch TVs playing my performance of continual baptism and altar building. Inspired by shrines in my relatives’ homes in rural China, the altar consists of traditional syncretic Daoist, Buddhist, and ancestor veneration practices; paraphernalia from the Baptist Church; and objects important to my family.
“Devotion is as unyielding as the grave. Love’s flames are flames of fire, flames that come from the Lord.” I often think of my work as unfinished fragments of my experience: memories, values, dreams, hopes, goals, and fears. They are precious moments where aspects of my life become open ended questions that widen my understanding of the world through visual symbols. In its “finished” state, my work seeks to invite the viewer to move into a space of speculation. I rely on my appreciation for conceptual typography and illustration to normalize and embrace inclusion, diversity, and acceptance. As an international student from a catholic background, throughout my time at Yale I have often sought safe haven in the stained glass windows of my church and the loving embrace of my parents. To me, religion was an extension of my family home, a place not only for comfort, but grounding love. My work in this thesis project is a close examination of Catholic symbols and their interactions with my queer experience. In this series of pieces, I reclaim religious objects and symbols by altering them, hoping to overwrite fears that exist and paralyze many religious members of the queer community (including myself). Intimately, this project is also a love letter to my parents. A testimony of the love and devotion that has become my faith, the main pillar keeping my belief in religion alive. My God is my family, and my heaven is queer.
This thesis project is not really a “thesis” project at all. These little paintings all come from a studio exercise that I began doing in the fall of 2019 and have picked up again this year, which I have lovingly termed the “bad paintings”—paintings made quickly and intuitively, without preciousness or fear. This practice came out of a place of deep ambivalence, of trying to renegotiate my relationship with art and school and budding adulthood. Fear of making bad art had made me nearly stop making art at all, so I had to remind myself that painting is fun. And that I love it. I had an art teacher tell me once that everyone is full of bad paintings, and the only way to make good paintings is to get all the bad paintings out of your system, so I decided to start the purging process. I was taking a semester off school when I began making my “bad paintings”—living in an apartment alone for the first time, working multiple jobs in a new city, making a bad painting everyday (somedays forcing myself to), stretching and re-stretching canvas over the same ten stretcher bars, slowly amassing a pile. The privacy of making paintings in a tiny room in a tiny apartment away from school showed me how to play, how to fail and how to fall in love with that failure. How to create an ethos of failure. I started making my “bad paintings” again after the pandemic and more time off, trying to figure out how to paint again in a world that I felt I didn’t know anymore. I still don’t know, and I learned that I probably never will but will just have to paint anyway. In a few months I’ll be moving home, finally out of school and starting an art practice of my own. As my time in college comes to an end, I feel like maybe learning to fail with love has been the greatest lesson I have learned. So I started making bad paintings again, and some of them are maybe actually good paintings. But that’s not my business.
The city is Los Angeles. The year is 2004. It’s a warm fall day, like most fall days in LA. You get home from Kindergarten and kick off your light-up Sketchers, then find a sheet of scrap paper. Soon, it will be filled with adventures of Gnocchi the Super Rabbit, the latest creation of your five-year-old mind. But for now, the page is blank, and it holds the endless potential to bring to life all of your zany characters and silly stories. It’s going to be a good day. 18 years later, not much has changed: the core of my artistic practice remains rooted in both the art of storytelling and the act of manifesting my own mind on the page. My work often centers on things that scare me, the parts of myself and the world that I have difficulty talking – or even thinking – about, perpetually seeking to translate the unspeakable into the understandable. It also tends to take the form of “low” arts – comics, animation, video games – narrative entertainment grounded in communication with the audience. My art looks inward, but it also seeks to find the universality in those feelings or thoughts or memories, to share them in a way that makes sense to me and to the viewer. I make art because I don’t know how to understand myself without it. The city is New Haven. The year is 2022. It’s a chilly spring day, like a lot of spring days in New Haven. You try to find a way to explain who you are and what you do, and maybe you succeed. You’ve come a long way since Gnocchi, but you still delight in the blank page. You still delight in the endless possibility of your own mind, in the power of creation and of sharing those creations with the world.
As a double Art and Environmental Studies Major, I created a work that allowed me to explore my interests in both fields. I hoped to create a commentary on consumerism, waste, fixation, and materiality through sculpture. I am a photo major, but realize that sculpture was the best avenue for my work within this respect.
Julie Tran is a senior at Yale University studying Computer Science and Art. Outside of class, Julie is Captain of the Cheerleading Team and manages the social media accounts of the sports teams at Yale and works part-time at the United Nations in Safety and Security policies. During her free time, she works on clothing designs in collaboration with Nike and her friend’s sustainable fashion line called Upcycled Angels. She also volunteers at Food in Service to the Homebound and manages local restaurants' instagram accounts in exchange for large food donations to the homeless in Greater New Haven. Throughout her time at Yale, she explored Art through drawing, painting, graphic design, and animation and investigated the ways technology can intersect with design. Her senior thesis piece is an interactive animated short film, reflecting on her experience growing up Asian American. The film divulges the unfortunate truth of being locked into an American tragedy while being denied the legitimacy of being American. Julie built a website to present the piece, and with JavaScript, the film allows users to make life decisions that Julie had to make in the past. With these decisions, users are able to experience the burden of prejudice when accessing the American Dream. The video and website is still a work in progress, but Julie hopes to finish the final product in late May.
I want to relive when I make. And photographs come closest in telling you what it’s like to miss my family in Belarus and what it’s like construct my own story within the familial narrative; what it’s like to put together a home so far away but filled with familiar symbols; what it’s like to console my dear ones in the face of a war; what it’s like to hold a warm quail egg, or look at my brother’s sweaty hair behind his ear, or to trace the wrinkles on my grandmother’s face, or to trace the wrinkles on a friend’s face; or what it’s like to find the people that feel like a new family for a moment or for many.
When talking to Roxane Gay about her work, Jenny Saville said, “you’re the only one who can never see your body in its entirety – you’re condemned to images of it.” Throughout my life I feel as if I have been bombarded by others’ perceptions of my physical identity. Constant comments about my weight, what I look good in, what I don’t, etc. have plagued me since I became aware of the kind of presence a woman should hold in the world. There is a certain authority and degree of intrusion that both men and women feel the right to impose upon female bodies—a destructive evaluation of one's worth based on their physical form. My work is an exploration and visual representation of me trying to figure out my relationship to my body and how it affects the ways in which I move throughout the world. Through photography, I seek to purge the associations we have with particular body parts, hoping to reach a formlessness through intense scrutiny and repetition.
What if Jesus was non-binary? What if inanimate objects had religions of their own? What if the mechanics of reincarnation happened via the preparation and ingestion of soup? Ever since I was young, strange what-if questions would pop into my head, but it wasn’t until I became an artist that I gained the tools to answer them. Because art is often a time and labor-intensive process for me, I try to only pursue answers for things I love, which often have some combination of beauty, queerness, and absurdity. Technology and its numerous applications in art are also a huge source of inspiration for me. The technological advancements that seem to be happening every day make me feel like anything is possible, and I like carrying that energy into my art practice. While I enjoy exploring more traditional media, I primarily work digitally with animation, 3D modeling, and image manipulation. I find that working digitally frees me from the limitations of the physical world, because as far as I can tell there’s no other medium with an undo function. Lastly, I try to add a touch of humor to everything I create. I believe that there is no greater physical sensation than laughter, and I revel in the opportunity to evoke that sensation in others. Although everyone may not share my sense of humor, the potential to make someone else smile is reason enough to create.
I like to think of my art works as some sort of reproduction of myself. I mostly paint on flat surfaces but sometimes incorporate sculptural pieces as does my thesis collection, composed of paintings and sculptures that discuss how it has felt to live in my body in the United States as a Korean immigrant, what mortality and life means to me as a queer subject, how my past and future shapes my present under the forces of capitalism and colonialism. Somewhat a wide range of topics, but really the simplest way of describing it might be that they are self-portraits that are vessels of my identity. They are charged with my emotions and spirit, my past and my intentions, and also are made out of things I have owned and used before : clothes my mother bought me, wigs I used to wear, skirts I no longer feel good in, my fathers's underwear, buttons from my old dresses, sweaters my ex gave me, chairs I used to sit on, trees I used to water ... This flawed, beaten, abused, neglected yet blessed, loved, celebrated and praised body and life -- and the shared experiences of marginalized peoples -- will forever be my source of inspiration.
Engine.lol is a gamemaker that is a game in itself. An ode to the early, handmade web and to toolmaking, it’s creation that inspires creation—as only the human invents tools to make other tools and has always used its own artifacts to reinvent itself. ‘Games’ are spatial and non-linear, navigated using a grid system assembled out of images, text, and original tracks. Every story made with the tool can be remixed, played, and published. The system itself is offline, built without reliance on depreciable software and is reproduced on analog media: flash drives, CD, & floppy discs; its soundtrack on cassette. A ‘tutorial’ system guides the user, providing a controlling or comforting narrative voice depending on the user’s actions. As the user tells its stories, the tool tells you some of its own, as well. The internet is rife with contradictions: how do we have the most advanced technology we’ve ever had, yet struggle with authorship and distribution? We ignore the physicality of the internet and its reliance on massive networks of physical infrastructure, yet lean into how it renders spatial difference irrelevant whenever we type in a URL. We digitize our memories and treat the internet as a permanent archive, though the loss of massive tools and software like Myspace and Macromedia Flash have lost uncountable stories, audio, and games. In display with a replica of the artist’s bedroom with parodies of retro tech ads, it’s also an exercise in worldbuilding and the culture that surrounds craft.
People’s perceptions of and ability to interact with their environment, whether physical or virtual, are not universally the same. My work explores finding connections amongst those differences and creating new experiences from them. It analyzes how people navigate the world according to its various interfaces, playing close attention to the ways that design impacts an individual’s experience. For the past year, my thesis has been an exploration of navigating the built virtual environment. I examined accessibility in virtual reality (VR) by utilizing the wheelchair as its new concrete interface. Being part of the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media’s (CCAM) Wheelchair Interface Project, my thesis contributes to their ongoing investigation of how wheelchair-bound users explore virtual worlds and why their experience calls for a new interactive interface that will improve experiences not only for them, but for all VR users. I created and 3D-modeled a design system that follows Americans with Disabilities Act regulations for a modular-unit-based playground. I took these units to develop the playscape in Unity with the rapid prototyping tool, the Verb Collective. The culmination of my designs is the experience one has navigating through this interactive VR playground in the wheelchair. It reimagines what mobility, accessibility, and delightful engagement in VR looks like for anyone.
I am primarily a figurative artist. Either consciously or subconsciously, my art focuses and draws inspiration from the body. The underlying thread that runs through my work is an exploration of the dynamic spaces bodies create. I started as a hyper-realist painter focusing on capturing the exact likeness of my subjects, but found myself fascinated by the structures and, indeed, architectural forms that are created through the interaction of bodies. In addition, my practice attempts to question traditional ideas around portraiture through the exploration and intersection of different mediums including oil painting, printmaking, and wood-working. For my thesis, I have built a wooden dining-room table that represents a body. The dining room table has always been a difficult place for me and is a site where I believe social expectations are shaped and enforced. It is a site of communion, where people converse, eat meals, and celebrate special occasions, but it can also be where gender roles are enforced, where labor inequality is enacted, where people are silenced, and where power dynamics are tangible. For me, the table also represents a complicated state of womanhood on a very personal level that grapples with domestic labor, objectification, and the ability to have control over one’s own body. I wanted to attempt to convey the build up of memory and trauma of these moments and how this would appear through an anthropomorphized piece of furniture. I purchased a used table and constructed a wooden frame to completely cover it, creating a mosaic of different woods and grain qualities. I used my own body as a reference and carved the figurative shape that covers the table, with the goal of creating a piece of furniture that is a living body that remembers all that takes place around it. The table underneath remains intact and purposely untouched and protected, while its outer shell suffers from external decay. I have poured an accumulation of wood chips, spices, coffee, and melted sugar into the cracks and impurities of the wood, to resemble sap or scar tissue patching and covering wounds in order to signify memory and healing. There is also shellac weeping out of the cracks as well, mimicking water damage but also conveys the table’s emotional state. The surface has been sanded and carved to expose the strained muscles of the table’s form and to illustrate decay and wear over time.
The original plan for my thesis was a series of oil paintings focusing on the imagery of bones and flowers. This was a chance to explore various ways to render this subject matter and experiment with a more textured style of painting. Over the course of the year, the series evolved into a collection in several respects. The end product is quite literally a collection of paintings, prints, and drawings. The scale shifts within the set invite the viewer to engage with the work more intimately and consider how each piece is not only a representation of some item not currently present, but also a collectible object on its own. But the series is also a collection of deeper meanings, self reflections, and personal associations. I grew sunflowers in my front yard from scratch when I was twelve, and there's been a patch of lavender growing next to my grandmother's front door for as long as I can remember. Paintings of skulls recall the tradition of vanitas still life, which serve as a reminder of mortality and the eventual victory of death over every living thing. The history of flower language gives symbolism to every flower, like the wonder and enchantment of lavender colored roses or the patience, prosperity, and good fortune of alliums.
i can't dance, but i've always been a lover of dance films. this piece can be understood as my way of living vicariously through all of the ballet dancers that i so love to watch in an a portable, immersive, mutable medium. none of this is random. everything on the screen is constructed, built, scripted to be there, whether directed by a python algorithm that i've written or based on the analysis data that the spotify api has fed to me. it's a performance. in this world, music and shape and color and light appear to be suspended in space. all digital spaces are connected to physical ones.
My artwork depicts somewhat of a dreamcatcher-like shrine of ancestral spiritual protection and memory that is intended to reflect the meditative practices I’ve engaged in in the past few months to help navigate my own anxiety and ADHD. The grunge-style mini posters at each corner many with darker or visually distorted backgrounds are meant to also imitate what one might ‘see’ beneath closed eyes or even a different visual spectrum in this sort of context. The video on the computer screen with the 80s and 90s commercials juxtaposed with more modern images and GIFs also represents the parallels between generational and societal learning that can occur and therefore unlearning that sometimes must take place when confronting the stories one may absorb unconsciously when caught in between two worlds. I encountered this experience in college as both a black person trying to achieve success in predominantly white spaces and a child of African immigrants from a culturally-rich background but also with contrasting social experiences and sometimes conflicting perspectives. The goal of the video is to simulate the resolution of the traditional and communal with the individual and modern, or in the case of ADHD accepting the part of oneself that values discipline and peace with the part that can also fluctuate or be somewhat impulsive and chaotic (inner child). The final feature are the Adinkra, or traditional Ghanaian symbols between each two posters that mean Unity, the Supremacy of God, Energy, and Forgiveness, respectively, again representing the resolution between the traditional and unconventional parts of oneself to achieve growth and happiness in life. The symbols also appear in the video as coded “mazes” the viewer can see the 2D and 3D perspective of navigating in between the images and cards appearing on screen.
A little about me: I was born and raised in Queens. I love exploring street food fairs during humid summer nights. I’m a sucker for reality TV shows like Survivor, 90 Day Fiance, and Masterchef Australia—they introduce spice into my unremarkable life. I’m also a veteran of horror/thriller movies due to my older brother’s sadist (just kidding) tendencies (he made me watch Shutter and Ringu when I was 8). I also love watching anime and Korean dramas. However, something that's always been true no matter how much my perspective and personality has fluxed over the years is that I've always loved reading books. When I was younger, I was always holed up in the local library in my favorite corner reading away late fees—I would devour poetry, YA fantasy novels, comic books, etc. Later on, when I began experimenting with different art mediums, I realized that while I don't enjoy placing people in my art pieces and could never capture the nuances of what made them special to me, people were always at the heart of my writing. Perhaps that's why I gravitated to graphic design, or more specifically typesetting literature. People change day by day, but books don't: whatever the author felt writing that specific line or choosing a word that rolled on the tongue just right is forever permanent within four borders. Books are like a hometown for the soul—it’s not about where we are from, but where our hearts long for. Using typography with intentionality allows me to attempt to capture that sweet nostalgia and whimsy and allow people to experience the author's writing in refreshing new ways that go beyond text plainly set left aligned with a loose rag.
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I believe in the power of intentional design in sparking conversations, inspiring action, and influencing decisions. My designs are driven by intent and informed by a culmination of research, close-looking, listening, seeing, and reflecting. My work is often multi-layered, involving different pieces and narratives unified by a central theme. My thesis, “Psychogeographies” is composed of a series of posters, zines, and an interactive installation that explore and celebrate my and my friends’ experiences in relation to Yale’s campus over the past four years. We are used to seeing maps that depict scientific and factual information, which often fails to capture the humanity of everyday life. My design methodology uses anonymously sourced data to visualize a narrative of emotions and experiences of both personal and collective nature. It is an attempt to visualize the often unseen information and aims to demonstrate how mapping can be used to bring depth and meaning to places through portraying emotions, memory, sensation, and imagination. The resulting maps aim to spark moments of reflection rather than convey scientifically accurate information. In other words, it can be considered an ongoing attempt to create emotional portraits of a city with the hope of making the viewers reflect on their time in relation to time and place.
I don’t apologize for saying things directly. I just care about you. And I care deeply about the people in my life, because their tears challenge me and their hugs are tender. They even allow me to get bored of them sometimes, and that’s a grace that we share, an understanding that we are understood and will return to each other. My art is about them, and by reflection, me and you. My studio practice is sustainable because my rage, happiness, gratitude, confusion, and their cycles keep me grounded. I joke about being a nihilist. But I’m just masochistic, only in a selfish, not self-sacrificial, way. I push to the boiling point so I can live longer. I’ve embraced the fact that I dwell: I throw things into chaos but draw them back and dissect how that whole mess made me feel. My art is queer and colorful. I had been fighting the colors for too long, and I’m glad I can now see them against these pockmarked white gallery walls and be proud of my (mostly) non-restraint. I like to get political, because I care about the personal, and I don’t want people to dictate the way you move through the world. I’ve been told that I have a large appetite. I see it as having a short attention span. You can decide which frame you prefer! A tl;dr list of influences would be: Ann Hamilton, Elle Perez, Pierre Bonnard, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Reverend Goddess Magora Kennedy, Cole Lu, Egon Schiele, Giacometti, Ernesto Neto, Eikoh Hosoe and everyone else in my archive of artists and thinkers. The bottom line is, we don’t have the luxury of shame. I’ve moved beyond hyperrealistic, explicitly-biological works, but I still relate to the body: yours and mine. I’m talking about queerness, intergenerational trauma, identity formation, denial, binding as restrictive and (gender-, medically-) affirming, family, honest and dishonest hugs, and suffocating maternal love. I want to draw us closer through figurative forms and trippy paint.
Walking through my grandmother's house was like entering a portal. There was a wall tiled in mirrors, tables with plastic tablecloths, wigs hanging from a shoe rack, an old wooden console piano, a living room carpeted in sandy beige and a kitchen with black and white tile floors. A display cabinet of untouched china lined the dining room wall, Folgers coffee and cans of Canada Dry were piled amongst scrabble, and dried floral arrangements filled every vase. This was my wonderland, a reality that felt like a dream. I wanted to recreate that space in my work. I found a home that was reminiscent of that space and invited a group of six women who I barely knew to come together in a “Historic Mansion” in New Haven. The mansion is owned by an elderly Italian couple, the wife is an artist and dollmaker and the house is adorned with her work. The space had a charmingly eclectic aesthetic just like that of my grandmother's home. The space was characterized by a twinge of faux extravagance, fake flowers, thick patterned armchairs, and ornate carpeting and light fixtures. I wanted the space to be a retreat for the women I included. I chose to photograph them as themselves, wearing thrifted and vintage attire from a slew of decades, exploring the space. The piece revolves around this Black domestic space and how Black women protect and perform within it. Whether it be by covering furniture in plastic or putting thrift store table ware in glass casing. These practices are metaphors for the way Black women move through the world. Beyond that there are symbols of their ingenuity. Both the ironing board (the one in the piece is my mother’s and is worn with age) and the clothing line (which holds the colonial style curtains setting the stage) were invented by Black women. Their contributions to society are embedded in the home and forms of expression. Layered under and onto the images of these women within this space are archival images of the women in my mothers family. I use cyanotype to create a sort of afterimage of my great grandmother whom I am named after. I believe that her legacy lives on within me. The bleeding and imperfection of the print further illustrates the tension of striving for an ideal (hard edges of the transferred images) but finding rarity in uninhibited expression. The sense of escape into this expression is emphasized by the image of the beauty supply store leading into an oasis. Which is overlaid with a video of the women who were in the shoot walking down/towards the aisle and disappearing. The audio which plays subverts the white fragility which is weaponized against Black women in order to prevent them from claiming their femininity. The women recite and reconstruct interviews that were conducted with white women (predominantly those in sororities) on how they see themselves. In doing so, the Black women who were featured subvert and reclaim space which despite their influence seems to never have had space for them
I am fascinated by our ability to decipher representation from even the most abstract of visual cues. I am also fascinated by paintings that capture the appearances of complex objects and settings by abbreviating them into a limited number of gestures. To demonstrate this inevitable coexistence of abstraction and representation, I paint my studio. My working process is concentrated entirely on answering two questions: “Which of my observations of my surroundings should I record, and how should I use paint to record them?” Simply changing these two variables allows me to look at the same view of my studio time and time again, yet each time produce an entirely new painting—defined not by the specific view of my studio it represents but by the unique arrangements of paint and color that simultaneously give rise to that representation and diverge from it into abstraction. Only I am able to perceive some of the abstractions in my paintings as depictions of my studio because of my familiarity with the space and my experience of making the paintings. However, by painting the same scene multiple times, my intention is for viewers to begin to see the paintings in the same way that I do, whereby previously indecipherable collections of brushstrokes become recognizable as specific objects or features of my studio. This occurs due to correspondences between different abstractions across multiple paintings that stand to represent the same object. Therefore, viewing multiple paintings in sequence is designed to heighten one’s attention to the nuances of each.
Wednesday, March 23, 2022 11:48 pm New Haven, CT I was tonight about to begin the process of printing out large press sheets for my book on the Vandercook, a step that comes after months of planning and typesetting, when the ink distribution motor gave out on me. Now, at nearly midnight, sitting covered in grease and ink at this impasse in my project, seems a good a time as ever to write my statement. The book itself is not the whole of the art. Certainly, it is the work, or some part of it, but the art — my thesis — is a celebration of printing through its practice. It is the time I spend in the Press sorting thin spaces so students can have an easier time of typesetting; it is the energy that comes to me suddenly, miraculously, when someone needs help printing, even when I am bone-tired. It is the tympan sheet, accidentally printed on over and over again, bearing witness to dozens of projects at a time. It is ruining my favorite pair of pants with grease stains climbing halfway into the Vandercook to get a better view of the stalled drive shaft. It is all the art, and it is all the work, the joyful stewardship of an ancient process in an impossible place, and if it produces a little book of poetry that is nice to hold and look at and read, then that is all the better. I am not worried, now — odd, because it’s in my nature to worry, and something has indeed gone majorly wrong only weeks away from the show. But I am on solid ground. I feel safe in here. Perhaps more than at any other time in this process, I am assured things will turn out — they always do. I love the Press. I think the Press loves me.
During my time at Yale, I’ve been exploring the intersection of art and technology, exploring the limits of web technologies as it pertains to creating artistic renditions and interpretations of the various corners of the Internet. I’ve created work that satirizes and comments on Internet culture such as the “foodie” culture, work that reimagines time, and even work that just simply looks cool. My current project, the “Spotify Web Visualizer” (No, it is not sponsored and has no affiliation with Spotify unfortunately, and yes, I will be working on a newer, cooler name for it), is another product of my adventure into the crazy universe that is the Internet. Most digital artwork seen on the web have been created by users and artists, so my new project instead has a computer making the art rather than a human being. The “Spotify Web Visualizer” is a web app that people can use to select songs from Spotify’s database, upon which the application itself will take the song and data from Spotify’s music analysis machine to create and render a 2-dimensional collage animation, playing with different shaped figures, images, colors, etc. Each rendition of a song will vary, creating a new and unique experience every time a song is played. The question, “can computers do what humans can?”, is the main focus of this experiment as the computer is attempting to create art, a form of expression that has been unique to humans for centuries. Who knows, maybe computers really will be able to imitate humans in the future or maybe I made this project just so I don’t have to make art myself.
I give these earnest toasts again—cliché as they may be—in honor of all who got drunk and shared an honest moment, back into the often hopeless void of being young in 2022. These toasts may not have solved any the fears or granted any wishes, but I hope they might echo within those who happen to come by. Cheers! 짠!
I grew up in a Baptist Church founded and led by white Texans – including the politician whom the press called the Texas Congress’s "most flamingly red member" – as a domestic missionary project to evangelize working-class Chinese migrants, including my family. Without a public safety net, low-income migrants like us turned to the church for free food, childcare, ESL lessons, and other social services. Adopting a Freirean pedagogy, my white Bible Study teachers aimed to “save” not only our souls by preaching Christianity, but also our minds by internalizing capitalistic, cis-gendered, heteronormative, white male hegemony in us. To this day, I am the only family member to have left this church and its right-wing politics. My thesis centers on this church as a site to critique imperialism, the religious right, and the myth of American meritocracy. To immerse viewers in my experiences, I serve them communion of Dr. Pepper and invite them to sit on handmade floor pillows between figures wearing my dad’s, my mom’s, and my baptismal robes and submerged in Dr. Pepper, red wine, and English tea. Together, the viewers and figures can pray before the altar on a handmade tablecloth wrapped in protective plastic, listen to my readings of the Evidence Bible, and watch TVs playing my performance of continual baptism and altar building. Inspired by shrines in my relatives’ homes in rural China, the altar consists of traditional syncretic Daoist, Buddhist, and ancestor veneration practices; paraphernalia from the Baptist Church; and objects important to my family.
“Devotion is as unyielding as the grave. Love’s flames are flames of fire, flames that come from the Lord.” I often think of my work as unfinished fragments of my experience: memories, values, dreams, hopes, goals, and fears. They are precious moments where aspects of my life become open ended questions that widen my understanding of the world through visual symbols. In its “finished” state, my work seeks to invite the viewer to move into a space of speculation. I rely on my appreciation for conceptual typography and illustration to normalize and embrace inclusion, diversity, and acceptance. As an international student from a catholic background, throughout my time at Yale I have often sought safe haven in the stained glass windows of my church and the loving embrace of my parents. To me, religion was an extension of my family home, a place not only for comfort, but grounding love. My work in this thesis project is a close examination of Catholic symbols and their interactions with my queer experience. In this series of pieces, I reclaim religious objects and symbols by altering them, hoping to overwrite fears that exist and paralyze many religious members of the queer community (including myself). Intimately, this project is also a love letter to my parents. A testimony of the love and devotion that has become my faith, the main pillar keeping my belief in religion alive. My God is my family, and my heaven is queer.
This thesis project is not really a “thesis” project at all. These little paintings all come from a studio exercise that I began doing in the fall of 2019 and have picked up again this year, which I have lovingly termed the “bad paintings”—paintings made quickly and intuitively, without preciousness or fear. This practice came out of a place of deep ambivalence, of trying to renegotiate my relationship with art and school and budding adulthood. Fear of making bad art had made me nearly stop making art at all, so I had to remind myself that painting is fun. And that I love it. I had an art teacher tell me once that everyone is full of bad paintings, and the only way to make good paintings is to get all the bad paintings out of your system, so I decided to start the purging process. I was taking a semester off school when I began making my “bad paintings”—living in an apartment alone for the first time, working multiple jobs in a new city, making a bad painting everyday (somedays forcing myself to), stretching and re-stretching canvas over the same ten stretcher bars, slowly amassing a pile. The privacy of making paintings in a tiny room in a tiny apartment away from school showed me how to play, how to fail and how to fall in love with that failure. How to create an ethos of failure. I started making my “bad paintings” again after the pandemic and more time off, trying to figure out how to paint again in a world that I felt I didn’t know anymore. I still don’t know, and I learned that I probably never will but will just have to paint anyway. In a few months I’ll be moving home, finally out of school and starting an art practice of my own. As my time in college comes to an end, I feel like maybe learning to fail with love has been the greatest lesson I have learned. So I started making bad paintings again, and some of them are maybe actually good paintings. But that’s not my business.
The city is Los Angeles. The year is 2004. It’s a warm fall day, like most fall days in LA. You get home from Kindergarten and kick off your light-up Sketchers, then find a sheet of scrap paper. Soon, it will be filled with adventures of Gnocchi the Super Rabbit, the latest creation of your five-year-old mind. But for now, the page is blank, and it holds the endless potential to bring to life all of your zany characters and silly stories. It’s going to be a good day. 18 years later, not much has changed: the core of my artistic practice remains rooted in both the art of storytelling and the act of manifesting my own mind on the page. My work often centers on things that scare me, the parts of myself and the world that I have difficulty talking – or even thinking – about, perpetually seeking to translate the unspeakable into the understandable. It also tends to take the form of “low” arts – comics, animation, video games – narrative entertainment grounded in communication with the audience. My art looks inward, but it also seeks to find the universality in those feelings or thoughts or memories, to share them in a way that makes sense to me and to the viewer. I make art because I don’t know how to understand myself without it. The city is New Haven. The year is 2022. It’s a chilly spring day, like a lot of spring days in New Haven. You try to find a way to explain who you are and what you do, and maybe you succeed. You’ve come a long way since Gnocchi, but you still delight in the blank page. You still delight in the endless possibility of your own mind, in the power of creation and of sharing those creations with the world.
As a double Art and Environmental Studies Major, I created a work that allowed me to explore my interests in both fields. I hoped to create a commentary on consumerism, waste, fixation, and materiality through sculpture. I am a photo major, but realize that sculpture was the best avenue for my work within this respect.
Julie Tran is a senior at Yale University studying Computer Science and Art. Outside of class, Julie is Captain of the Cheerleading Team and manages the social media accounts of the sports teams at Yale and works part-time at the United Nations in Safety and Security policies. During her free time, she works on clothing designs in collaboration with Nike and her friend’s sustainable fashion line called Upcycled Angels. She also volunteers at Food in Service to the Homebound and manages local restaurants' instagram accounts in exchange for large food donations to the homeless in Greater New Haven. Throughout her time at Yale, she explored Art through drawing, painting, graphic design, and animation and investigated the ways technology can intersect with design. Her senior thesis piece is an interactive animated short film, reflecting on her experience growing up Asian American. The film divulges the unfortunate truth of being locked into an American tragedy while being denied the legitimacy of being American. Julie built a website to present the piece, and with JavaScript, the film allows users to make life decisions that Julie had to make in the past. With these decisions, users are able to experience the burden of prejudice when accessing the American Dream. The video and website is still a work in progress, but Julie hopes to finish the final product in late May.
I want to relive when I make. And photographs come closest in telling you what it’s like to miss my family in Belarus and what it’s like construct my own story within the familial narrative; what it’s like to put together a home so far away but filled with familiar symbols; what it’s like to console my dear ones in the face of a war; what it’s like to hold a warm quail egg, or look at my brother’s sweaty hair behind his ear, or to trace the wrinkles on my grandmother’s face, or to trace the wrinkles on a friend’s face; or what it’s like to find the people that feel like a new family for a moment or for many.
When talking to Roxane Gay about her work, Jenny Saville said, “you’re the only one who can never see your body in its entirety – you’re condemned to images of it.” Throughout my life I feel as if I have been bombarded by others’ perceptions of my physical identity. Constant comments about my weight, what I look good in, what I don’t, etc. have plagued me since I became aware of the kind of presence a woman should hold in the world. There is a certain authority and degree of intrusion that both men and women feel the right to impose upon female bodies—a destructive evaluation of one's worth based on their physical form. My work is an exploration and visual representation of me trying to figure out my relationship to my body and how it affects the ways in which I move throughout the world. Through photography, I seek to purge the associations we have with particular body parts, hoping to reach a formlessness through intense scrutiny and repetition.
What if Jesus was non-binary? What if inanimate objects had religions of their own? What if the mechanics of reincarnation happened via the preparation and ingestion of soup? Ever since I was young, strange what-if questions would pop into my head, but it wasn’t until I became an artist that I gained the tools to answer them. Because art is often a time and labor-intensive process for me, I try to only pursue answers for things I love, which often have some combination of beauty, queerness, and absurdity. Technology and its numerous applications in art are also a huge source of inspiration for me. The technological advancements that seem to be happening every day make me feel like anything is possible, and I like carrying that energy into my art practice. While I enjoy exploring more traditional media, I primarily work digitally with animation, 3D modeling, and image manipulation. I find that working digitally frees me from the limitations of the physical world, because as far as I can tell there’s no other medium with an undo function. Lastly, I try to add a touch of humor to everything I create. I believe that there is no greater physical sensation than laughter, and I revel in the opportunity to evoke that sensation in others. Although everyone may not share my sense of humor, the potential to make someone else smile is reason enough to create.
I like to think of my art works as some sort of reproduction of myself. I mostly paint on flat surfaces but sometimes incorporate sculptural pieces as does my thesis collection, composed of paintings and sculptures that discuss how it has felt to live in my body in the United States as a Korean immigrant, what mortality and life means to me as a queer subject, how my past and future shapes my present under the forces of capitalism and colonialism. Somewhat a wide range of topics, but really the simplest way of describing it might be that they are self-portraits that are vessels of my identity. They are charged with my emotions and spirit, my past and my intentions, and also are made out of things I have owned and used before : clothes my mother bought me, wigs I used to wear, skirts I no longer feel good in, my fathers's underwear, buttons from my old dresses, sweaters my ex gave me, chairs I used to sit on, trees I used to water ... This flawed, beaten, abused, neglected yet blessed, loved, celebrated and praised body and life -- and the shared experiences of marginalized peoples -- will forever be my source of inspiration.