Continue

Potato starch, rice flour, water, coarse Korean sea salt, green onions, gochugaru, fish sauce, soy sauce, tangerine, inkjet printed canvas, air-dry clay, yarn, glossy paper, fabric scraps, thread, wood pallet, plywood, plastic bags, steel crochet hook, glass container, metal cafeteria tray, glass jar

2022

Continue is a multimedia installation that explores ritual, material, and narrative. By combining family artifacts and oral histories with found objects, Continue acts as a site to process intergenerational histories, while queering ritual and materials in the production of a diasporic trans futurity.

Through an hour long performance, I enacted kimjang, or the ritual of making kimchi, on family photos taken in post-war Korea and passport scans tracing my dad’s immigration to the united states. I stored these materials in six containers, becoming vessels for the fermentation, preservation, and transformation of a collective, ancestral history mired by colonization, imperialism, immigration, assimilation, and cisheteropatriarchal violence. The fermentation of these artifacts grounds a future-oriented act of labor imbued with care, sustenance, survival, and community, in a historically, politically, culturally situated past, leading to the construction of objects that transcend normative modes of temporal and spatial belonging.

One of the containers is situated on a Korean war era united states military cafeteria tray, alongside an inkjet printed passport scan, a partially crocheted sock, and a steel crochet hook welded and engraved with the phrase, continue. The partially crocheted sock historicizes an intergenerational oral history, whereby my great grandmother wove socks for others during the Korean war using yarn from socks she found amongst the dead.

The chogak-bo, the embroidered textile rag composed of found cloth and sewing thread, speaks to the memory of my great grandmother and my ancestors. The stitched manifesto tenderly yet urgently calls for survival to the vast collective of queer and trans diasporic peoples, emboldening the need for collectivity grounded in ancestral histories and practices of care in the face of degenerative systems of colonial power.

Collectively, this installation commemorates the past as sites—those inherited artifacts, salvaged materials, archived knowledges, rituals, and forms of communal care—for imagining more expansive trans diasporic futures.