ARTIST STATEMENT

Based on my own familial experience as the daughter of a Korean adoptee, Born in Translation is an exploration of womanhood, memory, and cultural formation across generations and continents. The title reflects the layered, sometimes fragmented way in which identity and culture have taken shape in my family, and how our sense of self has been mediated through language, generations, adoption, and distance.

In the past few years, I’ve met both my biological grandmother and my young nieces for the first time, encountering two generations at opposite ends of the lineage. Meeting them softened the way I think about identity and made me appreciate the quiet strength of existing in-between. Rather than a political resolution of the contradictions, I’m now more interested in observing and documenting how we’ve naturally learned to hold them.

While the paintings engage with themes of diaspora, hybridity, and representation, they are, above all, a personal homage to the women in my life and our past selves. They are acts of care. Acts of recognition. And most of all, acts of refusal, to be simplified, categorized, or explained. Women of the diaspora who are not returning to something lost, nor assimilating into something foreign, but instead embodying something new through a mix of adaptation, improvisation, and inheritance.