As a 2nd generation Korean immigrant, I have inherited fragmented memories, unarticulated histories, divided homeland(s), jjamppong-ed cultural nostalgia, and underdeveloped narratives. To the immigrant, language is frustrating, disjointing and ultimately language itself becomes the language of loss. However, this inheritance of disparity becomes a language. Loss is transliterated into discovery, situating the immigrant between multiple locations—a landscape of assemblage.
I am interested in the ways information, fragments, and materials exist, accumulate, and circulate within a community. Through my work, I aim to investigate how visual and material circulation creates cultural imaginations, multi-layered narratives, and collective memories that affirm, connect, negate, or condemn individual experiences. Through excavation of familial archive and historical references, my practice is an assemblage of precarious nostalgia, glass prayers, and treasured fragments from the immigrant’s longings for eschatological belonging—a collected longing that feel ineffable but on the tip of our tongues.
michellejeehyechun@gmail.com