I believe that the cultural influences and intellectual training we receive since birth create a structure in our brains that direct our processing of external stimuli. My awareness of this bias brings me to question the relationship among nature, culture, and myself—whether my thoughts and actions are pure products of my unique internal processes or merely caused by some predetermined algorithmic function that combines my place in this moment in history and my specific cultural experience with those external inputs.

As an artist born and educated in Korea, where I experienced a divide between Western Art and traditional Asian culture, I find it unavoidable to ask basic questions about the identity of culture, society, art, and finally, how they relate to my personal identity as an artist.

Through the process of my work, I explore the relationship between nature and our condition as recipients of cultural constructs. I aim to express my inescapable cultural being as part of a natural process. To do this, I employ various human-produced materials in my work: metal, fiber, newspaper, canvas, and pigment.

As I select each material for an artwork, I ask, “How does this object relate to culture and history?” This labor of inquiry, asking myself again and again what each element means, brings me closer to my identity as a cultural being. With this awareness of the layers of meaning embodied by materials, I create artwork that invites the viewer to experience culture as a phenomenon of nature.