My Korean-American Life

  The figures were enormous. Not in actual dimension — the paintings were canvas-sized, the sculptures bronze and finite — but in their insistence on being looked at, their refusal to make themselves small, their absolute rejection of the apologetic posture that a certain tradition of art criticism has always preferred from figurative painting. They took up room. They took up the room. And standing inside the Hangaram Art Museum at the Seoul Arts Center on the afternoon of May 3rd, moving from canvas to canvas in the long galleries, I began to smile and understand his humor and philosophy behind the paintings and sculptures.  "I have never painted a fat figure in my life," Fernando Botero once told his daughter Lina, who co-curated this exhibition. "What I created was a universal sense of volume, where every human figure, animal, landscape and object was treated in the same way — with the intention of giving generosity and sensuality to form." Volume is a philosophy...

  Hyo , Filial Piety: On Universal Ballet's Simcheong Official Highlight Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFwRD0zX4NQ She walks to the edge of the ship. The sea below is dark and churning, rendered in the theater with the particular combination of light and fabric and sound design that ballet uses to make the impossible present: the waves, the danger, the depth. She is sixteen years old, or the dancer playing her is — young enough that the sacrifice reads as a sacrifice rather than a decision, which is perhaps the point. And she jumps. I was sitting in the Opera House at the Seoul Arts Center on the evening of May 3rd, watching Universal Ballet's fortieth anniversary production of Simcheong , and I was thinking about my father. · · · The story of Simcheong is one of the oldest in the Korean repertoire — its origins lost in the oral tradition, its earliest written traces appearing in the eighteenth century, though scholars believe the tale is older. It has been told in ev...

  Today I visited the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) to see Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work exhibit . Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860–1961), universally known as Grandma Moses , I learned today, was a beloved American folk artist who launched her celebrated career depicting idyllic rural scenes in a self-taught, vibrant style, becoming famous in her late 70s. Grandma Moses did not begin her illustrious painting career until she was nearly 80 years old. For decades, she was a farm wife, mother of ten, and meticulous embroiderer, using wool to create "worsted pictures." It was the arthritis in her hands, making the finer work of needlepoint too painful, that forced her to pivot to paint. This forced transition—a seemingly small adjustment in medium—unlocked her true genius. Her paintings quickly transitioned from being small, homemade gifts to major museum acquisitions, launched by a chance discovery in a Hoosick Falls, New York, drugstore window. She sold her first wo...

  This morning, I drove out to a farm in Maryland to pick up my fiber art pieces after my first-ever holiday artisan exhibit. The works—eight Maedeup necklaces and two Jogakbo handbags— had been displayed as part of the Countryside Artisans Holiday Art Tour . When I arrived, the farm owner and organizer of this exhibit, Bev, greeted me warmly. A gentle smile gathered in the creases of her weathered face as she said to me, “No sale. If I may give you some advice, your pieces are so beautiful, but they need black backgrounds to show their beauty. Don’t be disappointed. Another artist who couldn’t sell for the past two years sold all this year. It’s all about display.” Then, she handed me my pieces, all carefully re-packed in the same bag I had dropped them off in a few weeks ago.  Her comment stayed with me far longer than the disappointment of the moment. As I drove home with my bag of unsold work beside me, I realized: this experience gave me two lessons more valuable than any...

<Ember> painting generated by  DALL·E My Korean-American writers' group is going to have a workshop next month with Dr. Mark A. Peterson  ( The Frog Outside the Well ) about Sijo. Sijo is a Korean traditional poetic form which requires the three lines of average 14–16 syllables: theme (3, 4,4,4); elaboration (3,4,4,4); counter-theme (3,5) and completion (4,3).  To prepare for this workshop, each of us is trying to write Sijo this month. I wrote one titled Ember and tried a painting with this Sijo using DALL·E. Ember  Like magic, fanning flames a bonfire’s dying embers. (13) Long ago, my mom used to fan the agungi* for cooking. (15) If fanning could rejuvenate my mom aging day by day. (15) * Agungi is a firebox in traditional Korean kitchens to burn firewood or other fuel for cooking. (Jan. 2023)