Bony Ramirez
Craig Taylor
Dabin Ahn
Drew Dodge
Ina Jang
Ji Woo Kim
Jin Jeong
KangHee Kim
Sarah Lee
Shuyi Cao
Shyama Golden
Sophia Heymans
Yoora Lee
Yujie Li
Yuri Yuan
11:40 am, 2024
Image credit: Aurélien Mole
Image credit: Aurélien Mole
6:18 pm, 2024
Image credit: Aurélien Mole
Image credit: Aurélien Mole
9:10 pm, 2024
Image credit: Aurélien Mole
Image credit: Aurélien Mole
3:10 pm, 2024
Image credit: Aurélien Mole
Image credit: Aurélien Mole
10:37 pm, 2024
Image credit: Aurélien Mole
Image credit: Aurélien Mole
8:26 am, 2024
Image credit: Aurélien Mole
Image credit: Aurélien Mole
8:05 pm, 2024
Image credit: Aurélien Mole
Image credit: Aurélien Mole
memory/
Growing up, I was always surrounded by people in the visual arts. My grandparents worked in fashion, my uncle is an architect, and my mom studied art history and archaeology in college. While I was growing up, my uncle would come over on the weekends and draw with me. He inspired me to create and opened my eyes to different fields, including fashion, architecture, and interior design.
I was born in Korea and moved to Vancouver when I was 5 or 6. My dad stayed in Korea because of work. When I first moved to Vancouver, I was in a predominantly white neighborhood, and I was thrown into that environment and expected to assimilate. In the beginning, it was a matter of learning the language, but I actually struggled more in fifth grade when I moved to a neighborhood that was primarily Asian. That was when I started to think about identity because as a child I didn’t have many avenues to engage with Korean culture.
A friend introduced me to Korean media, like K-pop and dramas, which made me want to start exploring my Korean identity further. From there, I felt that I was balancing identities, existing in the gray zone of being Korean and Canadian. I came to New York for college, studying for a BFA at Pratt, and that was the first time I interacted with Koreans from Korea. I realized how different I was as an Asian American. There was a clear distinction.
The process of thinking more about identity was gradual. The first time I wanted to make art about this specifically, was when I was speaking to my uncle, who has lived outside of Korea for the majority of his life. I was shocked when he said, “Don’t you feel like there isn’t one place that you can call home?” I thought that spending 30+ years in the US and Canada would make him well-adjusted to living here. I realized that this identity crisis would go on throughout my life. The in-betweenness is our home as Asian Americans.
line/
I’m a very nostalgic person, and whenever I visited home during college, I would dig through piles of family photos and reminisce. I was romanticizing my past in Korea, thinking about my dad, who was still there, and fixating on the idea that I experienced belonging when I was a child in Korea. The tourist paintings are based on photos of my mom when she was a college student. I was drawn to those images because they were of group scenes, and they spoke to my desire to find community. My mom studied traditional arts in Korea and archaeology, so she went on archaeological field trips. I have distinct memories of being in Korea and traveling to these sites and temples with my family. I think I hold onto these memories because of my dad–they evoke a feeling of familiarity and longing, but ultimately, these environments in Korea are not that familiar to me.
During my MFA program, I was working with a mentor who was pushing me to do something different with my paintings. We landed on the idea of collage, and I explored cut-outs. I wasn’t working with my own photographs, but rather photographs of my mom, repurposing source imagery according to my narrative. It’s similar to cutting images out and putting them down on paper the way I want them to be. I thought that the white paper showing through was symbolic of these Asian women being placed into white spaces, but taking over these spaces and claiming them as their own.
color/
Color is my favorite part of painting. I am into bold, bright colors, and my recent body of work incorporates a lot of fluorescence. I call my new body of work my “break up paintings,” which condense images of the trauma and depression I experienced in the past year into 24 hours. Since these paintings explore mental health, I was trying to find a way to be upbeat and make the process fun. I started all of the recent paintings by laying down a fluorescent ground color. I’m very drawn to pinks and purples, and that shows a lot in my recent works.I keep telling people that I want the “break up paintings” to be a Gen Z show, and the two images of me crying are based on my selfies. When I was first going through the break up, my way of coping was oversharing on the internet and uploading crying selfies, which is quintessentially Gen Z. I was trying to find ways to play into that humor, and I thought that fluorescence and the reddish skin tones and pinks would add a nice kick to the paintings, instead of this being a show about trauma and grief with a dark palette.
I don’t know what my next body of work will be, but I think making works about Asian American identity will always be relevant to me. Recently, I feel at home with the people around me, so I’m more interested in exploring mental health, emotions, and depression over searching for community. My future work will probably try to meet somewhere in the middle.
Gabrielle Luu is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY and the Editor-in-Chief of Civil Art.