Julia Kwon

Lives and works in Washington, DC, USA

Artist statement

My work explores different ways for creating ruptures on Korean patterns. I sew in the format of Korean object-wrapping cloth called bojagi, which was historically a creative outlet for Korean women who had limited contact with the outside world during the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910), to consider ideas such as tradition, craft, and feminized labor. I create figures inside enlarged bojagi to express the embodied experience and both the gravity and absurdity of objectification. I activate the textiles in relation to the frame, which become metaphors for framing and societal expectations for the authentic. Further, I create color gradients that turn to white to comment on the act of erasure and whitewashing. The textiles I create symbolize constructed notions of what it means to be Korean. My work is not simply a representation of minority identities, but rather a commentary on the dehumanizing process of being identified, reduced and categorized. I overload the bojagi textile with patterns that are perceived as Korean yet were produced internationally and found in the U.S. to comment on the complexities of constructing an identity in this contemporary globalized context. Moreover, by combining traditional Korean textiles with patterns found in contemporary U.S. politics, I consider both the past and the present to further investigate the idea of authenticity as well as transnationalism, cultural hybridity, and intersectionality. By meticulously creating Korean textiles, I...

Artwork