I paint objects that are integral to my personal narrative. These items are emblematic of the 1950s, an era of great productivity that reached a peak in the 1970s, when I was born. They served as the backdrop of my childhood in South Korea. In my paintings, I use a visible grid as a generative matrix to make representational work out of iconic items such as 1957 Coke bottles and caps, 1952 Volkswagen Beetles, and the toy soldier, all cultural icons of mass production. The products visualize, materialize, and recontextualize desire and belief. I place them within the grid

Unspeakable originated with my connection to Picasso’s Guernica. I feel compelled to return to this painting again and again, as it conveys extreme emotions for which words are insufficient. I embroider images of figures translated directly from Guernica. The series evolved to include imagery from other art-historical representations of distraught women by Kathe Köllwitz, Vincent van Gogh, and Frida Kahlo, as well as the preparatory sketches for Guernica. These women portray raw emotions—some are grotesque, nearly vulgar—reflecting the facial distortions of

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

1 pkg refrigerated pie crusts
1 can cream of chicken soup
1/2 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 cup milk
2 cups cooked chicken (season lightly)
1 12-ounce pkg frozen vegetables

Line 9-inch pan with pie crust.
Mix all ingredients together, pour into crust.
Lay second pie crust on top of filling.
Crimp edges.
Cut slits into top crust.
Bake 35 minutes, until golden brown.

I was wandering through a refurbished bed-and-breakfast in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. I was ten years old. The building, formerly Daughters College, had been a nineteenth-century finishing school for girls. As I explored the bedrooms that were once dormitories, I noticed that the windowpanes had random dates scratched into the glass, along with names of students, suitors, and other scribbled sentiments. Later, I learned that long ago, these young, upper-class women had engraved this graffiti with their diamond rings. My fascination with this

My work is concerned with how it is created and how it can be perceived. The craftsmanship is built on personal preferences and meaningful aesthetic decisions. These decisions relate to my personal life, art history, and art theory. The work becomes a product of a specific time and place that gives insight into the history of its own making.

I am constantly inspired by patterns and prints, my travels, summertime, Instagram, interior spaces, my immediate surroundings, fashion magazines, textile design, and meeting new people. I have an iPhone full of screenshots, and sketchbooks, notebooks, and a studio wall covered in notes and clippings— my collections of visual stimulants. A seed from these images, a West African textile, a languid Miu Miu model, a Slim Aarons photograph of poolside decadence, inspire the vibe for each painting. I plan each piece around this initial idea by creating

I’ve never seen my father in real life. I know him only through family stories, photos, and digital screens. Painting allows me to explore my lost family’s Salvadoran history in order to understand my own biracial identity. These histories include the subjects of war, the recurrence of mental illness, and loss.

Represented in these shelter sites is the human navigation of survival. The process is illustrated in both content and composition. When our modern world comes to an end, and the world-without-us continues, only our surreal consciousness is left to manufacture the dystopia. I use different textures in painting to emphasize an object’s meaning. Some works are rendered as still lifes, with juxtaposed impasto styles, while others integrate images from the Internet as a means of mirroring the chaotic variety of the world. Taken as a whole,

I tell stories about the past, and about how the beliefs and technologies that shape our realities change. These stories are small.

I met a woman who had just visited her childhood home in rural Australia. She was often alone when she was little. Sometimes, she and her brother would climb the 8-foot hedge surrounding their house, scaling the dark, dry interior branches and then floating on top. I would like to tell that story.

My work relates to the rapid state of change we see in the world at large—war, terrorism, refugees, displacement, identity, and collapsing economies.