In the summer of 2023, I booked a flight to fulfill my lifelong dream of traveling to Korea. How does one prepare for seeing a family they've never met and a homeland where they've never set foot? The unique juxtapositions of family and strangers / familiar and foreign - coexisting, scared and excited me at the same time. In the car, when driving to the first ever meeting between me and my grandmother, my cousin helped me write the sentence "HAL-MONI-POGO-SHIP-A-SAYO" on a post it note. The english simplification of 할머니 보고 싶었어요 - grandmother, I missed you. To this day it is the only phrase in my vocabulary she can understand.

Artist statement:

At surface level, There is an absurd normalcy to these scenes. In the absence of history, translation apps, and in the silence where language dissolves, the family exists as if uninterrupted.

But in reality, my presence within it is brief and almost accidental, a  temporary alignment of destines that despite all odds finally    overlapped. The gold beneath us becomes a way of holding this contradiction and give weight to something that felt both entirely complete and impossibly fragile

There is always a quiet awareness that all of this is temporary, it was always a beginning shadowed by the uncertainty of its end and a first meeting also carries the weight of a last. These paintings attempt to preserve the rare and quiet moments where everything feels whole, and our familial wound momentarily closes.

When the the ordinary becomes divine.