Relocating from the relatively homogeneous South Korea to the rather heterogeneous United States inspired me to explore the process of perception and its relationship with space. How viewers perceive space is related to their past experiences: positive, neutral, and negative. Space is neutral, yet perceptions are experience-bound and they color art spaces in familiar and unfamiliar ways. I create multiple layers in which a wide range of elements establish figure-ground relationships.

The quirky humor of my paintings results from the playful and imaginative process of building with paint. Paint is my versatile building block . . . from the range of paint-body consistencies and hues to the energy of brushwork. I paint wet-on-wet and search for the painting as it develops. I soon begin to define the specifics: the major players, focal points, smells, sounds, time of day, quality of the air, season. Open-ended narratives and allegories emerge as I elaborate on the images that jump out.

In my work, I attempt to capture filmic experience with a still painting. Cinema is a very accessible art form for me, and I am thrilled by its voyeurism. It brings me to an elated, uncanny place. Like an anatomical doll, cinema presents an almost-real reality. Horror films are particularly uncanny, and this draws me to them. And while all films are inherently voyeuristic, horror movies illustrate and explore voyeurism directly. The most effective horror films reveal just enough information to allow the audience to use their imagination to fill in the puzzle.

My work explores the concept of hybridity within cultural identity, particularly related to the Iranian-American experience. Inspired by mythological narratives, present-day imperialism, voyeurism, and the female body as a metaphoric site of social and individual trauma, my work is an attempt to meld the two cultures that inform my personal experience.

My work extracts forms from bodily gestures and movements and suspends them in a flattened constructed plane. Inert and abstracted, these shapes take on new roles, cast simultaneously as isolated objects and as parts of a larger composition, affecting the gravity and balance within an implied space.