Art, for me, is about the acts of seeing and being seen; that feeling that you have to share the beautiful, or the true self, with someone else. I look at myself, humanity and the world, and try to create something beautiful from the composition, and sometimes, from the wreckage. I also take that wreckage: what’s frightening, fragmented, broken, abused and overlooked and shine the light on it. While that light contains beauty, I also hope it contains what is real.

My art used to be an aesthetic blitzkrieg. I saw myself as a mythic bird standing amidst an explosion of words, images, symbols, ideas and colors swirling up around me, and I was constantly reaching and struggling to grasp onto something concrete. As a Korean adoptee who grew up without any genetic mirrors, I decided to create them using those words, images, ideas and symbols and refashioning them into self personas to explore the questions: Who am I? and Where do I belong? I use found object installations, performance rituals and mixed media self-portraits to continue to explore the many facets of myself as I live and study my own life/art process.

One of my mentors told me that my work now contains all the mythic-ness of self persona that it used to, without the heart-wrenching quality. There’s more healing.

I can see my whole self, accept all of it, and I’ve now integrated many of those pieces that used to feel so fragmented and overlooked. I’m still enthralled with the mythic-ness of living my own life/art process, and I know myself well enough to know I will continue to keep reaching towards new words, images, symbols, ideas and colors that capture the beauty and meaning in my bowler hat persona as I live my inquiry of becoming and creating myself and art anew.

I’ve been called a mixed media writer; sometimes lyric, sometimes hybrid, always across and to cross lines of form and genre. I use any and all means of self-creation and self-expression to service my work, including ones that take me away from the page and into my body, or an art installation, or a video essay.

I think of my writing like this: I write from the ground up, every project a Gothic cathedral. I used to walk by old Gothic buildings on the streets of Budapest; the graffiti on the sides a marker of social progress, but the highest arches still ornate, mythic and reaching.

And that is poetry. The poet is the mythic self within me, and the essayist the observer of places, of people and stories. . .lights, camera, archetype!

It’s faces I remember, fondly, that taught me how to walk, what to wear, how to live and who to love, even if separated by a silent gray skein or black theater.

Come into my presence as an act. Come into my presence, you are not a stranger.

Is looking inside another’s face looking away from our own truth or staring at a revelation? Is it less real to cry at the grief and loss in a work of fiction than it is to cry at the loss and grief in our own life?

Façade | facade

Come into my presence.

You can learn more about my art, writing and professional work on my Curriculum Vitae.