I am a third culture artist caught between worlds where identities blur and meanings shift. My work often emerges from the bilingual ambiguity of words and images, exploring the spaces in how we perceive, interpret, and connect. This perpetual state of in-betweenness shapes a practice rooted in introspection—a reflection of the elusive search for belonging and resonance.

 On the floor of my studio lie piles of pages torn from magazines, textbooks, novels, children’s stories, poems, and thick heaps of print material that I find and collect. Gifts from friends, a lucky find on a walk, hours spent scouring nearly abandoned bookstores—like a deck of cards, these shuffled fragments order and reorder, making their way into otherwise abstract paintings on thin, reflective aluminum panels.

 My paintings explore forms of myth-making. Family photographs, moments captured from a car window, or collected screenshots serve as a point of departure. Contemporary delusion is embraced. The paintings are constructed through distinct layers. Hard walls become slippery surfaces that give way to thick impasto. A transmutation occurs, allowing space for contradictions, multiple timelines, and a precarity of physical space.

 I am a hyperrealist oil painter. I carefully apply thin layers of different colored paint the consistency of room temperature butter on top of and beside one another. Through this technique and by thoroughly scrubbing wet paint onto thin layers of dried paint, I piece together an image that can appear more photographic than painted.

 I firmly believe that the power in the act of creating should be pure, joyful, and without limitations—much like how children freely express themselves through art. I left my home country of Korea for the United States at the age of fifteen and while I have lived here ever since, Korea has remained in my mind as an object of longing. That is why the influence of Korean art is inseparable from my work.

 Creating a pictorial space that mirrors the world, my abstract paintings use forms and colors as materials to articulate the invisible aspects of life. The forms come from familiar places, such as my studio, my apartment, and my desk; when I combine and remove parts of them, they inevitably take on a strange shape, becoming more inherently uncomfortable, abstract, and organic.

 I create representational and figurative paintings that emanate from ethno-graphic practices and focus on interpersonal relationships. I want to reconnect with my roots by creating artworks that are based on Filipinx art and traditions. My art employs multiple processes and artistic choices that cohere with my desire to represent the people with whom I share my culture.

 At what point do our histories turn into mythology? Do our ancestors become characters in stories we tell our children before they go to sleep? At what distance do our homelands become dreamlands? Does our blood begin to speak a different language? Or, do our bones turn to milk?

 Moncada’s practice is rooted in the Andean mountains and the tropics, a type of landscape that folds and unfolds, hosting multiple semiotic processes. This environment expands the world by reflecting, multiplying, and transforming signs, a process that has bled into Moncada’s artistic practice. By creating staged and constructed images, she proposes self-aware scenarios that reveal the double nature of things, thereby opening up to other ideas of how the world could be.

 My work examines the American automobile, a symbol of class and desire. Cars themselves consume vast resources, often obtained through imperialistic practices, while also being one of the leading causes of death. For some, our ever-larger trucks and SUVs turn driving into a militaristic playground; yet, driving also creates a unique interiority and mental space that is unavailable to many of us anywhere else.