Art Department

For my thesis, I examine the radical resistance of preparing and serving meals to immigrants and refugee families in the United States and how relational aesthetics combat narratives of isolation and exploitation as a result of Western Imperialism. The participation pertinent to this project will draw on ideas of horizontality and the transmigrational experiences of people of color. I will explore the act of spoken conversation and food as acts of cultural modes of production and the phenomenon of subversively existing. The embodied reclamation of the domestic sphere of the kitchen and femme gendered performance will be informed by my research on the shaping of a community following voluntary and involuntary displacement. I intend to create spaces for purposes of intimate gathering and engaging with groups of people who have faced social and political disenfranchisement. I aspire to find common ground with immigrants and their descendants while leaving space for nuance and dissimilarity. The design of the space will mirror a home setting to minimize architectural exclusion. While a home takes on a myriad of definitions to every individual, I hope to embody warmth and relaxation. I will specifically be creating space in the Paradox this fall semester for my first meal serving with an open invite list, and in New York City in the spring for my second and final dinner. I have created clay serving vessels that hold food and drink in several forms. I cook three to four courses for each dinner. My event has been documented in the form of a book, where conversation in written form is included as well as photography of the community mealtimes. I will also be showcasing some of the vessels I will be making for the project, while other vessels will be redistributed to the people that I will be sharing space with. With my ceramics, I will be pairing modernity with traditional Eastern antecedents; the designs and shapes of traditional Chinese ceramics will be mirrored.

Ago is a game inspired by games like The Sims and Yumme Nikki, while trying to focus on the perspective of princesses and empathy in video games. I also discuss how I implemented a needs-based algorithm for my gameplay

This written portion of my thesis delves into the complex historical context of post-Armed Conflict Guatemala and analyzes how the hegemonic structures in place in modern Guatemala, largely stemming from Spanish colonialism and US Imperialism, have a direct impact in how artistic expression evolved and continues to exist in contemporaneity. My thesis comic, Chenoj, is a partner to this written section, and reflects my concern to center themes of racial identity, land ownership, and intra-community relationships through a strong focus on the visual and historical characteristics of post-armed conflict Guatemala.

The Ornamental Self is a series of paintings exploring architecture and clothing as tools for constructing a visual identity. The portraits feature imagined figures dressed in fantastical garments based on and decorated by distorted architectural forms. To create this series of designs, I drew upon significant architectural settings from my life, transforming them into images of clothing with aim of anthropomorphizing the buildings and infusing them with personality. The written portion of this thesis investigates the intersection of these two forms of visual expression. I focus on their overlapping use of ornament, examining how structure intersects with décor, and function with presentation. I interrogate where our concepts of the function of fashion and architecture overlap, demonstrating how each relates to the body as a worn thing, and stressing their shared role as surfaces which evoke interiority through exterior expression. Furthermore, I discuss methods by which architecture can be considered to possess a distinct living identity, particularly through narrative and memory. With my work, I aim to fuse architectural identity with fantasy and clothing as a method of bringing it to life.

My artwork acts as a material mode of thinking through larger inquiries surrounding fatness, queerness, and representation. The written portion of the thesis serves the same function, although it takes on a very different form: a collection of letters. As my research progressed throughout the year, I found directly addressing the artists I was studying to be an effective means of organizing and communicating my thoughts. We begin with an open letter to British oil painter Jenny Saville. Next, I’ve written a love letter to photographer Laura Aguilar. The final chapter is a letter to my past self, at three distinct periods of my life. In the final section, I describe my artmaking process and how it came to fruition. Images of the thesis artwork appear on pages 30, 31, 35, 39, and 40.

This thesis draws a connection between asexuality and contemporary art through my interpretation of artists’ photographic series and installations and through my accompanying creative exhibition, Moments in Bed. Given the problems surrounding common notions of the queer orientation of asexuality as purely an absence, I emphasize a way of addressing and interpreting asexuality within art which reframes this narrative of absence into an alternative form of subtle presences. I conceive of an artistic notion I call asexual traces to asexually queer spaces, bodies, objects, and relationships with a particular consideration of nonsexual modes of intimacy, touch, and sensuality in order to combat compulsory sexuality. My creative work subverts the symbol of the bed while drawing heavily on domestic objects and desexualized images of the body to uncover intimate, nostalgic, and sensual asexual traces within the quotidian.

& we boarded the windows with lace is a composite photo series detailing the interior Queer experience. Drawing upon two Queer artists' approaches to art, Nan Goldin's daily life photography and David Hockney's Cameraworks editing style, this work consists of ten composite photographs detailing the intimate worlds of seven different Queer people. Too often, work surrounding Queerness lumps Queer people in the myopic roles of predator or victim. Straight photography, as a lens of viewing the world, flattens Queer experience and caricatures Queer people for the aim of mockery or horror. Opposite of this, Queer photography, as a type of artistic method, gives the humanity back to Queer people by embracing the variety and nuances of Queerness. This photography style's embracement of Queerness is denoted by a mutual consent and shared experience between artist and subject. In creating images revolving around the ways Queer people conduct themselves in their private world, I aim to graphically depict Queerness as Queer people experience it. In addition to the photography, I also collected and curated interviews from my models to allow their voices to speak to their personal experiences of Queerness.

This thesis explores the intersection of culture, ethnic identity, and the prevalence of iconography, specifically as these categories pertain to an understanding of my own Korean heritage. To achieve this, I survey the modes and means of imagery and how such motifs relate to an examination of the Korean peninsula's national identity and self-realization during the mid-to-late 20th century. Through a series of digitally-rendered illustrations I delineate the tensions between the culture that has defined my mother's homeland, the physical and temporal distance imparted by the act of immigration, and my personal investment as a second-generation Korean-American in combating the desire for assimilation. At first glance a distinctly "Korean" identity seems daunting to build from the ground up. Thankfully, there exist certain iconographic through-lines that can be traced through history back to a time when Korea was making active efforts to reinforce a cohesive sense of national unity. The Japanese occupation and tussle for supremacy between Western powers that marked the 1950s signaled the need for stability and a unified identity within Korea's borders. Similarly, the traditions of storytelling—both pictorial and written—established with indigenous shamanism and shaped during the dynastic years began to cement a canon for a unique mythology based in natural landscapes specific to Korea. Special attention will also be given to the cultural imports of the current day, and how globally-successful movements in art and music can still be indicative of a Korean national spirit. All of these narratives come into play while I seek to delve into what makes the physical land of both North and South Korea so vital to an outside understanding of their once-combined canon. Special regard will be paid to the role the natural world plays in establishing a sense of inherent connection to generations past and present—how the surrounding flora and fauna has come to both define and be defined by a human experience, and how that experience can in turn affect a perception of a uniquely Korean culture. With these goals and questions in mind, the illustration anthology accompanying the written thesis will contend with signifiers of culture through a surrealist lens. I seek to convey dreamlike and vivid atmospheres while painting representations of local Korean wildlife and geography, mythological creatures, and other material symbols of an identity found both in the United States and Korea itself.

Acts of Creation And Collaboration: Knitting Using Historical Patterns is a project in which I use my prior knowledge of knitting to follow directions from Victorian-era knitting patterns from scanned and archived knitting manuals. This project dabbles in historical costuming, but welcomes anachronisms rather than condemning their inclusion in the process. The pieces made include a pair of fingerless gloves and two sontags, one made using a 2020 pattern and the other made using a 1860 pattern for comparison’s sake. The pieces created from the patterns will be gifted or given away to be used once the exhibition is closed, rather than sold or displayed.

Each section of this thesis takes a different approach to explicating/evaluating the aesthetic strategies, religious and political backdrop of the artwork that was the main pulsion of the project: one seeks to lay out the gender senary present in classical Jewish religious law, before asking what (mis)applications it could potentially have as a resurfaced tool of Israeli occupation; another section concerns photography and fucking, putting forth a photoontology that eschews the primacy of penetration for the more recent—yet always present—concept of circlusion; yet another section collects diary entries written across the time spent making the artwork as a means of explicating it non-retroactively, in its actual moments of creation or as close to them as possible; there is also an image gallery to further illuminate the process and a postscript of sorts.

The present thesis includes a 16-minute video and a written portion. The first half of the written portion is an autobiographical novel, and the second half is the inspiration and process behind the video-shooting. Titled No Worries, Let’s Fall in Love in the Parallel Universe, this thesis project tries to capture the emotional trajectory from love-at-first-sight with the wrong person to coming to terms with myself. Touching on themes such as intimacy, trauma, theoretical physics, and healing, I wish to provide an artistic and metaphysical way of explaining human interactions and consciousness. Content Warning: trauma, mental disorder, and nudity (in the video).