Being KA

Currently, I’m working on a series that plays on my identity as a Korean American. Moving to Virginia in 2021 and befriending Korean moms who are 1.5 gen made me realize how different our childhoods were despite sharing the same ethnic roots. This became more apparent as we broke bread together. My friends who grew up in Korea had better access to whole foods and freshly prepared meals, and those were the food memories they went back to. Unlike me, they were not at all nostalgic for local deli sandwiches with a side of saewoo-kkang. They didn’t crave spaghetti with kimchi, Capri Sun with bulgogi, Choco Pie as a dessert after Hot Pockets, or rice wrapped in bologna.

As a child of absent, overworked immigrant parents, I often had to fend for myself. But somehow the memories of those patchwork meals still bring me a sense of bittersweet joy. Now, as an adult with two kids and my own home (the American dream!), I appreciate the safety within these walls. I get to give my kids something better than what I had, as well as tap into my own inner child, healing old wounds—through art, and through food.

With this in mind, I started this project with stream-of-consciousness writing about my food memories, and then reached out to other KA friends. We talked about the foods that formed them and childhood ideas of their future dream houses. My vision is to create visual stories that capture these collective experiences, not only my own, with the foods we ate as the building blocks for the homes we dreamed of having one day.

I wanted to portray this intersection—of survival and hope, memories past and dreams for the future, being Korean and being American—in a fun way. My first exploration deals with thinking of all the Korean and American foods I grew up eating as a latchkey kid and using those as materials to build parts of the house I now own.

I initially thought about making an entire 3D model to draw from, but reality kicked in (seaweed gets soggy!), so I decided to build parts of the house to make photo references. Then, I put these together to form a more complete image to draw from.