Though the Christian church my Korean mother grew up in discouraged the exploration of other religions, she found meaning as a young woman in the intersections between Christianity and Buddhism, Hinduism, and Shamanism. She studied to be a Christian missionary, but ultimately became a therapist and a teacher of Pungmul, a Korean shamanistic ritual music and Salpuri, a healing dance. I grew up watching her dance, understanding instinctively that the bodily practice of ritual might heal the failures of language and logic. My art draws upon diverse spiritual texts and practices and seeks to heal the rifts between eastern and western religion through bodily transcendence.

My work represents a cleansing of accumulated memories, both personal and social, through immersion in the physicality of the present. I combine hair sculptures, video, performance and drawing to convey the process of clearing the mind and directing one’s attention into the body, which enables a heightened awareness of the present. 

In my videos, I perform ritualistic meditation ceremonies. My head is shaved and I meditate with my back to the camera, embodying the detachment from gender, culture, time, thought, and ego inherent in meditation. The immersive quality of film in conjunction with my “every man” appearance invites viewers to inhabit my body, vicariously experiencing the ritual and the transformation it engenders.

Many of my videos, such as Sensory Thought I (2008),Listening to the Mind I (2009), and Emptying the Mind (2010), use hair as a symbol.  In these videos, I let go of a sculpture woven from my sheared hair, and the sculpture lifts slowly into the air, representing the departure of my thoughts from my body. Human hair, at once ephemeral and tactile, is an important symbol throughout my art.  As it grows, hair represents the accumulation of time and memory. Since hair is the last part of the body to decay, it is also a symbol of remembrance. As a material, it is intimately corporal and focuses the viewer’s attention on the body. 

I also create live performances using various materials, including hair, salt, water, sumi ink, pottery, and eggshells.  In these performances, I enact a cleansing of personal and collective memories often comprised of long-term actions involving endurance and silence.  I offer an artistic experience in which one can slow down, pause, and in a sense, transcend time.  In this way, my performance becomes a meditative practice for deepening one’s awareness of the moment.

Being Korean means carrying the painful memories of Japan’s 35-year occupation, the Korean War, and the subsequent division of our country and families.  I have found the practice of cleansing the memory, fully inhabiting the present, and acknowledging our duality vital to processing personal and sociopolitical rifts.  Cultivating non-dual awareness means that seer and seen merge into a global awareness that excludes nothing.  The ego and its organizational divisions evaporate, unifying good and bad, joy and pain, North and South Korea, east and west. 

My work synthesizes hair sculpture, video, photography and performance to blur the boundaries between artist and viewer, to create an immersive sensual and spiritual experience that encourages the viewer to rethink their own personal awareness.