My transition from growing up in Korea to living in America has been conflated with my own growth as a girl into a woman. As a first generation immigrant moving here in my early teens and adjusting to the United States, I have observed many similarities, but at the same time just as many vital differences between my two cultures. Although this unfamiliarity of place and customs expanded my perceptions, the confusion of it all somehow became located in objects.

Many families with histories similar to mine came to the United States to pursue the American Dream. In the process of creating a successful family life, the burden of maintaining success is usually passed from the parents to their children. In my case, my parents started a number of small businesses but finally settled on a family-run dry cleaning business.

Washing, drying, pressing, and delivering customers’ clothes involves a variety of materials and labor patterns. I have been continually exposed to all throughout my early adult life and even through the present. In my art practice, I engage in my own repetitive process with similar intensity towards dirty to clean, removal of waste of objects and materials.

My studio practice, which emphasizes mimicry of labor, gives me time to process the issues being brought out in the work, and also exposes me to the meditative process of its production. This dual focus on material and process is a way for me to embed something intangible, like the energy of labor or personal memory, into an art object.

Even my work process has begun to reflect the labor-intensive practices of my parents’ work in their new lives. My installations utilize accumulations of dry cleaning materials that have embedded history and evidence of labor, to explore how the physical object can contain the stresses of everyday life, as well as the public perception of this type of work-- struggling everyday in a noisy, tight, boiling and filthy environment where workers are forced to complete their repetitive tasks under specific systems.

In my recent works, I started looking at the dry cleaners as an industry of removing the human element. The workers are de-humanized by being forced to perform mechanized actions and to minimize unnecessary motions to save time to maximize profit and to capitalize on the functionality of the body. Moreover, the process of cleaning and pressing to fulfill people’s desire for the appearance of antiseptic, modern, and more mechanized quality erases the human essence. How far can people reduce individuality or human essence or personal dignity?