Throughout the last decade, the increasing US military presence and aggression in Korea have pressurized the peninsula, while reductive Cold War narratives taught in the West have led to a fractured sense of identity, obfuscating lived experiences and diasporic memory abroad post-armistice. From decades of corrupt international adoption practices and generations born from military marriages during colonial occupation, to the attempted deportation of multiple Korean/American citizens during this administration, the diaspora occupies almost combative layers of identity. Conversations around performative identity, plastic representation, and “blunt-force ethnic credibility” further embed notions of cultural hierarchy and perpetual othering.
This work has led me across the country, photographing folks in spaces where they feel connected to themselves outside of implicit cultural biases – where they live, write, organize, and feel a sense of community and connection to the lands they inhabit. Between tokenization and surveillance as two sides of the same coin, there is little record of the leisure of the Asian body, the comfort of a home not required to be a museum of cultural history, the individual not propagandized as a symbol of reductive archetypes performed for Western consumption. I hope this work helps others sculpt their own identity outside of existing political and commercial frameworks, and find freedom in rest and leisure as radical acts of self-determination.