“As an Asian American, I think a lot about dealing with identity in my work, and sometimes I would like to just, as a poet said, ‘write about flowers instead of books,’” said artist Kyungmi Shin.
“But now, I feel an urgency to talk about my heritage and myself in a poetic manner as well.”
Born Christian in Buddhist South Korea, Kyungmi Shin emigrated to the United States at age 19. Through the lens of her family’s experience, she traces her roots by investigating cross-cultural impacts, and the influence of Eastern philosophy on Western culture and spiritual teaching. In her latest works, painted collages and porcelains are juxtaposed with intimate family photographs, historical chinoiserie paintings, and Christian narratives found in medieval manuscripts.
In Shin’s Father Crosses the Ocean, an enlarged photograph from the artist’s family album shows a group of young Christian ministers from South Korea, including her father. It is overlaid with a painted image derived from an illuminated French manuscript. The result is a crossing of East and West, combining many of the aesthetics and subjects characteristic of Shin’s works. She looks at the cultural hybridity of being Asian American and the Korean diaspora, remnants of immigration and colonization, and themes of belonging and community.
“I’ve been really interested in looking at the hybridity, which manifests in a lot of different cultures. In a way, it's impossible to have a culture that is cut off from an influence from another culture. It's always been a very connected world,” she said in a recent talk hosted by the Getty Museum.
Shin’s works affirm art’s potential to heal, remember, and reimagine personal and cultural histories. I recently spoke with Shin about the history of cultural hybridity, as well as the visibility and resilience of being an Asian American artist.
Thuy Bui: When I first saw Father Crosses the Ocean, I immediately recognized the narrative and connected with the piece as it’s a familiar story in many immigrant households. I’m always looking for art that reflects my experiences, made by people who look like me. Could you give us a sense of how you started as a visual artist?
Kyungmi Shin: I am moved to hear about how you recognize yourself in my work. As Asians, it’s hard to find our experience, faces, and bodies represented in an empowering way in artworks—rarely in art history and uncommon in contemporary artwork. Representing the cultural specificity of being an Asian, being a Korean American, as well as the hybridity that contemporary living and the life as an immigrant embodies, was something I wanted to do in the series of works that includes Father Crosses the Ocean.
I started my academic career in medical school back in Korea. But after a year of study, my family immigrated to the US. I came to this country with a plan to go back and finish my studies in medicine in Korea after I obtained my green card. But I ended up staying in the US and studying biochemistry and working in pharmaceutical and medical research. While working, I started taking a drawing class at night at a junior college and found that I had talent. I continued to take more art classes, and after a year and a half, I quit my job and started to study painting at San Francisco Art Institute. In retrospect, I think I felt a strong pull towards art as I felt a lot of relief in expressing myself through art-making. I was also in mourning for my late mother, and art became a place where I could reflect on her life in a meaningful way.
TB: Tell me more about your family photograph behind the painted image in Father Crosses the Ocean.
KS: The photograph is from my family album but not a family photograph. It’s a group of young Christian ministers in South Korea, and my father is in the group. I think it’s from the mid-‘60s, and the photo was taken after a conference or a meeting.
TB: Could you describe what’s happening in these contrasting scenes? How did you come across this medieval manuscript you painted over the family photograph?
KS: The medieval manuscript image was found from a 14th-century manuscript, Play of the Sacrament. It was one of the manuscript books I borrowed from the library. This particular illumination is very unusual in that it does not illustrate a biblical scene. Instead, it illustrates contemporary figures including the French king (Charles V), bishops, and a priest who is about to embark on a journey. Recently I found out that the scene depicts a feast for the king while he is watching an enactment of the crusaders invading Jerusalem. Perhaps the presence of the priest/missionary is a religious message about the spreading of Christianity to the new world/colonies.
Juxtaposing this manuscript image illustrating a missionary on a boat with a group photo of Korean Christian ministers from the 1960s in Korea, I felt, was a poignant juxtaposition, presenting the opposite ends. Korean ministers looking to the West for their religious inspiration, and the European rulers and churches looking to the East to expand their power.
TB: A lot of your recent works also feature cross-cultural imagery and motifs. How did this concept begin? Why were you compelled to connect Western art with contemporary photographs in your work?
KS: The series of work started with looking at my father’s life. In 2018, I was reflecting on my father’s Alzheimer’s and how he was losing his memory. His condition gave me a sense of urgency to investigate his life, and as I spent more time looking at my family photo archive, I realized that these photographs were not just personal records but also historical records of the time that he lived through. I started to think about the historical forces that were behind my father’s life. How was a Korean man born in the 1930s a second-generation Christian, and how did he become a Christian minister? How did he identify with the crusaders so much that during the Korean War, he volunteered to fight as a high school student in a young soldiers troop named “the crusader?” I thought about the political, religious, and economic movements between the continents that were behind my father’s life, and I wanted to investigate these complicated narratives in my work.
TB: In your artist statement, you said that you’re investigating a global connection from a personal perspective through looking at your father’s life. What was one of your most memorable encounters with your family during the course of making these collages?
KS: This painted photograph (or collage) was part of a larger exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art that opened in September 2020. This show was supposed to open in April, but the Covid pandemic shut down all public spaces and my show was delayed. During this same time, my father fell seriously ill unexpectedly and passed away in May. So when the exhibit finally opened, it became a memorial of sorts for my father. When my stepmother came to see the show, she was really moved to see my father’s images represented in the works even though my intention was to utilize the story of my father’s life in a larger discussion about history. I liked that she could make her own personal interpretations of the works.
TB: I wanted to ask you, since you are Asian American—Korean and also Korean American—if you could talk about the insights that each has given you about identity, and also the resources that each culture has given you in becoming the kind of artist you are.
KS: I always operated my life as someone who is driven by aspirations of who I want to be, say an artist, or a doctor, and not by my racial and sexual identity. But I realize that when someone sees me, they see an Asian woman and the prejudicial assumptions and evaluations of that label can be a bigger part of their perception of me.
Being bicultural, for me, is a gift of understanding the contradictions between the cultures and navigating those contradictions to create a unique perspective, a privileged perspective. In addition to my immigrant experience of coming from Korea to the US 39 years ago, I also built a studio home in Ghana, Africa, 15 years ago with my husband, and that also has expanded my perspective about the world. We now run an artist residency in our Ghana studio.
TB: Do you frame your work as resistance for yourself and your communities?
KS: As an Asian American artist, I feel an urgency to make artworks that put our presence and our history, and our experiences at the center. Like in Tony Morrison’s narratives, we need multiple voices and multiple centers represented in the art world. Perhaps making artworks putting an Asian perspective at the center is an act of resistance and an effort to shift the discourse, conversations, and the power dynamics in the art world.
TB: Who are your influences in terms of finding a space for your own voice and representation in art?
KS: Most recently, Kerry James Marshall’s work has been a powerful inspiration for me in terms of thinking about the representation of marginalized bodies. He is engaging the art world and art history on his own terms, and his practice gave me a lot of courage to create artworks that shift the center of perspectives and that present my immigrant, complex, and privileged view of the world.
TB: Do you have any advice for young or emerging Asian American artists reading this?
KS: I feel a little inadequate to give any advice as my journey as an artist to this point is a story of more disappointments and failures than successes. One thing I wish I had as a young artist was a trust in my capacity to make good work and the persistence to see it through despite failures and disappointments. It’s so easy to be discouraged. To young artists, I would like to say that you should have confidence in your inner wisdom and the authenticity of your voice. Just keep showing up to make work trusting that the process will guide you.
