I am at once celebratory and skeptical of painting. With a studied awareness of painters’ scope of indulgence throughout history, while maintaining an aspiration towards intellectual purpose, I adopt various attitudes in the face of the challenge of painting: casual versus intentional, cynical versus optimistic, sentimental versus indifferent. I evaluate paintings in their relationship to one another. As their interconnectivity occurs naturally and strategically, a multiplicity of personality is revealed, embracing and critical of all pictorial ways of making meaning.

Relocating from the relatively homogeneous South Korea to the rather heterogeneous United States inspired me to explore the process of perception and its relationship with space. How viewers perceive space is related to their past experiences: positive, neutral, and negative. Space is neutral, yet perceptions are experience-bound and they color art spaces in familiar and unfamiliar ways. I create multiple layers in which a wide range of elements establish figure-ground relationships.

The quirky humor of my paintings results from the playful and imaginative process of building with paint. Paint is my versatile building block . . . from the range of paint-body consistencies and hues to the energy of brushwork. I paint wet-on-wet and search for the painting as it develops. I soon begin to define the specifics: the major players, focal points, smells, sounds, time of day, quality of the air, season. Open-ended narratives and allegories emerge as I elaborate on the images that jump out.

In my work, I attempt to capture filmic experience with a still painting. Cinema is a very accessible art form for me, and I am thrilled by its voyeurism. It brings me to an elated, uncanny place. Like an anatomical doll, cinema presents an almost-real reality. Horror films are particularly uncanny, and this draws me to them. And while all films are inherently voyeuristic, horror movies illustrate and explore voyeurism directly. The most effective horror films reveal just enough information to allow the audience to use their imagination to fill in the puzzle.