Adaptation Painting

This painting is part of a large body of work created for my first solo show, "Marks Of the Displaced", shown in February 2019 at Galatea Fine Art, Boston. At the age of 6, I was displaced from Seoul, South Korea, and relocated to Nairobi, Kenya. Since then, the longest time I have lived in one place was 11 years, in Nairobi, my adopted childhood home. Since leaving Nairobi, I have moved from place to place, never setting down roots anywhere. I now call Boston my home. On a recent trip to Baja California Sur, Mexico, I was reminded of the feelings I had growing up in Kenya. The terrain of the two places are vastly different, but there was a quality about the sunlight, the dryness of the air and the harsh beauty of the landscape that connected the two places in my mind. This body of work seeks to marry my memories of places I have loved with the colors that I have collected from recent travels. With the marks I make on the canvas with a paintbrush or the marks made by silhouetting sculptures against a painted background, I hope to not only remember all the places I have lived in so that I have a sense of home in my own memory, but also to leave behind the marks for those places to remember me. I often feel that my tracks through those places have been erased. With these works, I hope to leave behind my marks.