Over many years, the increasing US military presence in Korea has only deepened the divide between North and South, and colonial narratives taught in the West have led to a fractured sense of identity that contrasts with lived experiences and generational trauma from the diaspora here post-armistice. From decades of corruption adoption practices and generations born in the US from military marriages during the “Forgotten War” to the attempted deportations of multiple Korean / American citizens earlier this year, living in the US as a Korean occupies numerous 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.
In Western pedagogy, the portrayal of Asian folks holds a strong bias to extremes. Extreme poverty – struggles and sacrifices are foundations for future generations, internal competitions of status within the new landscape. Otherwise, the extremes of wealth and celebrity – pop music icons as subject of exoticized idolatry and imagined dynasties of transplanted generational wealth portrayed in cinematic fanfare. There is little record of the leisure of the Asian body, the comfort of a home not having to be a museum of cultural history, the individual not propagandized as a symbol of reductive archetypes performed for the camera.
I have spent the last few years traveling across the US, photographing folks in spaces where they feel connected to themselves outside of implicit cultural biases. Where they live, dance, write, organize, and feel in community. Between tokenization and surveillance, there is an increasing risk of losing the archive of lived experience. I hope that the dedication of intention and time spent within these spaces can create potential for future representation, and an imagined home for those feeling as lost as I do.