Under the fictional sobriquet, “Corean (de)Construction Company”, my most recent work has been examining the relationships between tradition and pop culture, new and repurposed, dogma, dualism and democracy. It is an attempt to examine not only my own transnational identity but also contradictions within our culture.
Pairing traditional techniques with new themes I capture the jarring nature of co-existence, whether it be the ongoing struggle between the Koreas and its people, internalized ideas of race and classism, or the humbling of mindfulness and migration.
I use text and image aspects of propaganda to make commentary on the proximity between Western advertising and Eastern propaganda. Both attempt to “sell” ideas to create change or improve the human condition. Through the medium of text, both carved and printed, on wood, I tackle issues of identity, race, division of land, migration, mindfulness and conspicuous consumption.
By breaking down and rebuilding structures, I dismantle materials and then reconstruct, or “reunify”, them into new structures with modified propaganda, messages, meaning, images and text, resulting in deeply personalized structures that were born from themselves. This idea of dualism through comparison of the similar is prevalent through my work.