Can you tell us about your practice?
I’m an artist who primarily works with painting. As someone who moved frequently between the U.S. and South Korea growing up, I’ve always been attentive to the pressures and expectations that shape how we perform ourselves within social structures. I explore this by creating situations where opposing forces occupy the same space without resolving. I’m interested in tensions like sincerity and performance, attraction and repulsion, or authenticity and artifice, and in how identity can be all of these things at once.
Your solo exhibition at RAINRAIN Gallery is titled Cafeteria. Could you tell us about the title and the eponymous painting in the show?
The central painting, Symbiosis (Cafeteria), shows a three-headed student at the center of a chaotic lunchroom in an act that’s genuinely ambiguous: she could be consuming spaghetti or expelling it. The surrounding identical figures react with fascination, judgment, or discomfort. These figures are versions of me, archetypes I have inhabited, and autonomous characters with their own internal logic, often all three at once.
The cafeteria felt like the right setting because it’s a place where identity is constantly being evaluated in public, and where small decisions feel unexpectedly high-stakes. What you eat, where you sit, who you sit with: these things carry a social weight that feels almost absurd in retrospect but was completely real at the time. Moving as frequently as I did growing up required me to try to assimilate into my environment as fast as possible. The cafeteria made the social rules especially visible because the participants were young and hadn’t yet learned the adult habit of being polite or wearing a sociable mask. Judgments were immediate and unforgiving. I have memories of certain cafeteria foods being labeled “cool” or “uncool”. Chicken nuggets were cool because they were neat and easy to eat. Spaghetti was uncool because it was messy, and the cafeteria version was never great: mystery meat sauce and bloated noodles. I remember wanting to eat it anyway because it’s one of my favorite foods, but I was afraid of being made fun of. That tension between wanting something and fearing what it costs you socially is exactly what the work is about.
What struck me while working on the show was how familiar these cafeteria structures felt in a contemporary context. The rigid social groupings, the patterns of comfort and validation, the difficulty of moving outside established roles: these dynamics haven’t disappeared, they’ve migrated. Social media and algorithmic platforms operate the same way, but now at a scale that would have been unimaginable then. We have more access and exposure than ever before, yet we remain deeply rooted in familiarity, gravitating toward what confirms us rather than challenges us. The cafeteria started to feel like an origin point for something that still shapes how we navigate identity today.
Themes of nostalgia and aporia have long been crucial to your art. How do these interests emerge in your most recent body of work? How has your relationship to these themes changed over the course of your practice?
Nostalgia in this body of work isn’t about idealizing the past so much as revisiting it as a place of investigation. The school setting provides a framework where identity feels especially unstable and exposed. Many of the smaller paintings in the exhibition function like artifacts, such as a Picture Day photograph or an honor-roll certificate, objects that once felt extremely significant but now feel strange and slightly unreal. Looking back at them creates a sense of distance, but it also shows how much those systems still linger psychologically.
Aporia, or unresolvable contradiction, is still central to the work. I’m interested in states where meaning can’t settle into a single interpretation, where opposing truths can exist at the same time. Spaghetti became a particularly useful example of this because its meaning is so unstable. A warm bowl at a grandmother’s table radiates comfort and familiarity. The same spaghetti cold, canned, or bloated becomes something almost grotesque. That complete swing between emotional and cultural extremes in a single subject felt like the ideal stand-in for the unresolvable contradictions at the core of the work.
Earlier in my practice, I approached aporia more abstractly, almost as a philosophical condition. In this exhibition, it feels more grounded and embodied, something that plays out through social experience and memory.
Your visual language pulls from quite varying and sometimes opposing areas of art history and cultural references — what is most important to you in weaving together these relations?
The connections don’t feel as opposing to me as they might appear at first. Culture constantly builds on and references itself, so these sources feel continuous rather than contradictory. High-fantasy role-playing games, for example, draw heavily on Western medieval and Byzantine imagery, and older mythologies and archetypes inspire many monsters and characters in contemporary media. These relationships are already embedded in the culture we experience every day.
I’m interested in taking existing narratives or archetypes and opening them into alternate paths that relate to contemporary experience. Sometimes that comes from very personal interpretations of historical references. When I first saw Édouard Manet’s The Dead Christ with Angels at the Met, I was struck by how contemporary it felt to me, almost like a performative meme about burnout and existential exhaustion. That reading stayed with me and eventually became a reference point for Spaghetti Lariat in this exhibition.
I don’t approach references as quotations or deliberate oppositions so much as fragments of a shared visual language. Bringing them together allows the work to operate across multiple levels at once, which feels closer to how we actually experience images today.
Your work begins with research and digital sketching before arriving on canvas. Could you tell us more about this process, as well as how you find order and balance while creating multiple new works at once?
I build a reference archive of found images and my own drawings and start by assembling fragments digitally: textures, figures, and details that feel conceptually or formally right together. The digital work is more like a provisional structure than a resolved composition.
Those fragments are translated into paint, but the translation is never exact, and I want to preserve that. Some differences come from conscious decisions about how to translate flat pixels into gesture and paint. Others come from the inaccuracies of human perception and physical limitations. These differences inform the next steps in the collage and how to move the work forward. I photograph the painting and bring it back to the screen, using what has emerged to determine the next stage, before translating it back into paint. The final painting is slowly built up through cycles of working alternately in analog and digital spaces.
The analog aspect feels increasingly important to me because we are inhabiting digital spaces more and more, often at the expense of our physical presence. This process is my attempt to keep one foot genuinely in each, to take both seriously. When I’m painting, it requires intense concentration, a kind of full physical presence. When I’m working digitally, I take full advantage of the control I have over every element, scrutinizing and adjusting until everything is exactly where I want it. The two modes ask completely different things of me, and that tension is part of the work.
What are you interested in these days?
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about care and nurture, both in familial and pedagogical contexts. My work has always dealt with identity as something performed within systems of expectation and evaluation, and recently I’ve been thinking more about what it means to be cared for and to provide care. That comes partly from a recent loss in my family, which brought us together in close quarters that hadn’t happened in a long time, and brought long-standing questions about care and obligation back to the surface. In turn, I realized I was also in a position of providing care, but from an institutional standpoint as an educator, which made me interested in the nuances between those two kinds of care and what they ask of the people involved.
I have been researching The Unicorn Tapestries at The Met Cloisters because I see strong connections between the key figures in the series: the unicorn, the virgin maiden, and the hunters, and questions of care, obligation, and control.
The entire story revolves around the desire to possess the unicorn, an elusive creature believed to have miraculous powers and to resist all attempts at capture. I keep wondering what would happen if the unicorn were not what everyone believes it to be. What if these extraordinary qualities are a projection of human expectation, and the unicorn itself is something much more ordinary, closer to a horse marked by an anomaly than to a mythical beast? I think this is becoming a framework for the next body of work.
