In the last decade, the increasing US military presence in South Korea has only deepened the divide between North and South, making the concept of reunification less and less possible with each passing year. Even the term “Korean-American” comes with its own stigmas and political attachments, subdivision after subdivision of identity making it difficult for the individual to find community and a sense of self. Historic international adoption practices become recontextualized into stories of abduction and displacement facilitated through corporate greed, and the concept of cultural education is a burden thrust upon the individual without regard for its roots in systemic failures. From adoptees to generations born in the US from military marriages after the “Forgotten War” to the attempted deportation of Columbia student Yunseo Chung earlier this year, living in the US as a Korean occupies multiple layers of existence, often at odds with one another. Places you’re born into make you feel othered, places you can’t return to without a perceived complicity in a colonial power struggle. Be thankful you’re here, but never belong.
Within photography, I have long been captivated by portraiture’s ability to translate quotidian existence and familial environments, to elevate the individual as representative of a whole. But, like many iconic projects taught and exhibited in the Western “documentary” canon, most portraits I grew to learn and take inspiration from contained predominantly white faces that did not match my own. Rebels thrived in reckless abandon and escapism, the youth sprawled in Edenic leisure across a diverse plethora of landscapes, and the homes of every class of individual were placed upon the same pedestal of visual celebration through countless layers of representation. Can the Asian body be afforded the benefit of banality?
In the Western visual canon, the portrayal of Asian folks tends to only exist in extremes. Extreme poverty – struggles and sacrifices are foundations for future generations, shown through endless narratives of labor and one’s importance quantified through capital success in the face of adversity. The burden of legacy building and family lineage, internal competitions of status within the new landscape of a “diversified America.” Otherwise, the extremes of wealth and celebrity – pop music icons as a subject of exotic idolatry and the imagined dynasty of a fictional generational wealth are portrayed in cinematic fanfare. There is little documentation of the leisure of the Asian body, the comfort of a home not having to be a museum of cultural history, the individual as a community member, not a symbol of reductive archetypes performed for the camera.
I have spent the last few years traveling across the United States, photographing folks in spaces where they feel connected to themselves. Where they live, where they converse with the land, where they dance, paint, write, learn, organize, and feel in community with those around them. Between tokenization and surveillance, there is an increasing risk of losing an archive of lived experience. I hope that with They Told Me We’re Heading Somewhere, even more than the images themselves, the dedication of intention and time spent within these spaces can create potential for future representations of the diaspora, and an imagined home for those feeling as lost as I do.