EXCLUSIVE ARTIST Q&A

Tell us a little about yourself – how you decided to pursue a career in the arts?

 I was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, and later spent nearly a decade in New York City. Both places shaped how I see the world—bustling, layered, full of people and stories. For me, community is nature. I’ve always tried to understand people and capture their rhythms and emotions in visual form.

As a child, I was obsessed with comic books—drawn to characters who were strange and unique, like I often felt. Making art became a way to reflect on identity and to ask, quietly or boldly: Where do I belong? Who am I becoming? That question stayed with me. Over time, portraiture—of others and of myself—became the language I used to explore that.

What inspired you to start the Waterman series?

When I moved to Utah from New York, I felt like I had landed in a beautiful yet unfamiliar landscape—majestic mountains, wide skies, but also a place where I didn’t see myself reflected. It was quiet in a way that made me hear my own internal noise more clearly. I began tracing my daily life, photographing what I saw, then outlining these scenes in delicate lines—like trying to make sense of a new language, a fragile new reality.

Into these traced landscapes, I inserted a body—sometimes mine, sometimes imagined. A half-bare, amorphous figure made of water in motion, caught mid-transformation. That figure became Waterman.

Water is many things to me: nostalgia for the sea that surrounds both South Korea and New York; fear of drowning in the unknown; the memory of breastfeeding—where water becomes nourishment, then grief, then release. The leaking droplets during a mammogram after motherhood reminded me how memory leaves traces even when we think we've moved on.

In open studios, I met others who also felt like outsiders—searching for identity, for community, under a dominant culture that often flattens nuance. Waterman became not just my story, but a collective one.