BY ALEEN ARSLANIAN
Asbarez was invited to an early viewing of the “(Be)Longing: Asian Diasporic Crossings” exhibition at ReflectSpace Gallery, where we had the opportunity to meet with three Los Angeles-based artists whose works are featured in the show, including Annette Miae Kim, Kyong Boon Oh, and Jennifer Cheh.
Curated by Monica Hye Yeon Jun and Ara and Anahid Oshagan, the artworks on view in “(Be)Longing” offer insight into each of the artists’ diasporic experiences and struggles with belonging. The exhibition features photographs, sculpture installations, a video, as well as maps—one of which, a relatively new piece made with Armenian newspapers by Kim, spotlights Asbarez.
Born in New York and raised in Southern California, Annette Miae Kim spent most of her life feeling rootless. She remembers feeling alienated while growing up in Newport Beach in the 1970s, where she, her brother, and “a pair of Japanese brothers were the only people of color.” She felt “mostly invisible.”
Movement is a central theme in Kim’s artwork and speaks back to her own family story. Her mother’s family fled the Japanese occupation of Korea as refugees in China, her father’s North Korean family fled south during the Korean War, and later settled in the United States. However, regardless of displacement, “the Korean identity is deep,” she said, as she discussed how her scroll map projects often require the viewer to physically engage with the artwork by moving from one end of the piece to the other to fully take it in.
Nearly 40 years after the outbreak of the Korean War, Kim’s parents had the rare opportunity to visit North Korea with her grandparents, where they were reunited with family members. She described it as an “intense experience” that has shaped the work she does. Kim, who is a professor at both the Roski School of Art and Design and the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, creates maps in her research.
Through her art practice, which counters colonial cartography, Kim has come to realize just how closely language is tied to identity. While describing how hearing her Korean name provokes a visceral reaction, she mentioned that she was moved to learn that Western Armenian is an endangered dialect, and spoke briefly about working with Tongva and Chumash groups who are trying to recover their own native languages.
Kim considers her art practice to be “very L.A.,” as she drives around the city hunting for ethnic newspapers to use in her projects. “It moves me that all these people are trying to speak. It’s so human to want to express yourself,” she said, as she described how each diasporan community that makes up the city unintentionally impacts the other.
Kim has two pieces featured in the “(Be)Longing” exhibition, one of which, titled “Untitled,” was created using, in large part, Asbarez newspapers. The artist is no stranger to Armenians, having shared her first art studio with her college friend, author Nancy Agabian. She noted that Agabian also sent her Armenian newspapers to use for this project.
According to the artist, most of the newspapers used in “Untitled” were provided by artist Ara Oshagan, who curates exhibitions at ReflectSpace Gallery alongside his wife, Anahid. The remaining materials were found while “hunting for materials on my expeditions around the city,” Kim said—“I call it spatial ethnography.” She drove around Glendale until she came upon a small Armenian convenience store on a residential street, where no one spoke English. There, she found three different Armenian publications to take home to use for the piece.
“I know, someday, newspapers will be obsolete. But it moves me, especially in ethnic communities, that they’re still there and important,” she said.
The piece with Armenian language was created specifically for the “Be(Longing)” exhibition, and was completed in six months. It features Korean script intersecting in a vertical line on the canvas with Armenian letters placed horizontally across the length of the scroll. From a distance, the most Armenian aspect of the piece is the artist’s use of the unmistakably Armenian tricolor—red, blue, and orange—which are painted across the canvas.
“Conversations with My Father” is a tribute to Kim’s father, who “has Parkinson’s dementia and has lost so many things, including mobility and language,” the artist said. Typically, in her other artwork, black lines signify migration. However, in this case, it signifies her father’s journey. The piece “starts out with intensity of Korean, and then it becomes English with intermittent Korean,” she said.
Kim touched on ReflectSpace Gallery’s history of spotlighting stories about communities that have experienced “the same kinds of fight against denialist history,” while emphasizing that these communities are stronger together. “That’s what I love about L.A. In some ways, I still don’t feel like I belong anywhere. But the place I feel I most belong in the world is L.A.”
In the “(Be)Longing” exhibition, “Conversations with My Father” flows to Kyong Boon Oh’s work, “6.25 – Korean War Project,” which is about her father and the effects of the Korean War, and its aftermath, on his life.
Oh’s father, now 90, has been longing to return to his hometown in North Korea and reunite with his family since the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. At 16, he was separated from his family “as a result of the 38th parallel—which refers to the demarcation line between the North and the South,” Oh said.
In 1998, Oh made the decision to leave Korea to study art in the United States. This upset her father, who was traumatized from his own experience of being separated from his family. She described how difficult it was for her to leave Korea without being able to say goodbye to her father at the airport, as his trauma prevented him from sending her off.
Growing up in Korea, Oh was a practicing Buddhist. However, when she landed in Irvine, CA 26 years ago, she quickly realized that there were no temples in the area. Yearning for a space to practice spirituality, Oh found herself visiting churches in search of a spiritual connection. “Love exceeds all religions,” she said as she described how her parents remained Buddhists but allowed her to explore Christianity and build a relationship with God.
Although “6.25 – Korean War Project” is primarily about her father, Oh learned lessons about her “own diasporic journey as an immigrant artist” through the work. On display are sculpture installations, a series of photos, and a video accompanied by glossolalia—a spiritual practice she has held for more than 20 years, which she often incorporates in her art practice.
The video portion of the project includes a 2014 Red Cross interview with Oh’s father. The interview was made “in an effort to search for family members that might be alive in North Korea,” Oh said, while painfully discussing his unsuccessful efforts.
While working on “6.25 – Korean War Project,” Oh recalled struggling with a multitude of emotions and questions about the human condition. While editing the video interview—which she had previously avoided watching—she questioned her motives in undertaking the work. “Who am I making this for? What can I gain for myself from reliving the vulnerabilities of my father and family?” she asked herself.
Oh found answers to these questions through her art practice. “In the beginning, I thought it was for my father, but I came to realize that it was for myself,” she said. “And even though everything is exposed, I’m not ashamed of it. If I could live truthfully as an artist, I might be able to live as a human being without shame. I believe, in the end, I have been unearthing myself from myself to be truthful and empowered.”
The multidisciplinary artist incorporates copper wiring in a number of her sculpture installations. The wires are a symbol of Oh’s childhood in Korea, where her father was a metalsmith. She described being surrounded by spools of copper wires, which she would often play with, in her youth.
“Navigating the intricacies of the project was hard, because of the weight of history and the emotional depths of family ties,” said Oh as she discussed the difficulties of sifting through archived images from the Korean War, which she used as part of her “6.25 – Mapping” installation. The piece includes photos of Korean War refugees, as well as those of her own family.
The “6.25 – The Displaced” photo series is Oh’s attempt to “contemplate overlooked narratives by means of image deconstruction” by “generalizing the notions of displacement, assimilation and the desire for belonging.” She achieves this by removing the figures from the images, leaving an abstract, blurred space in its place.
Reflecting on her own diasporic journey and artwork, ceramicist Jennifer Cheh spoke about the complexities of identity and unintentionally drawing inspiration from her own experiences. The iconic, traditional Korean moon jars—called “dal jars”—on display in “(Be)Longing” were hand-built by the artist.
Although Korean moon jars had always inspired Cheh, she admitted feeling too intimidated to attempt to create “something so iconic” until 2023, more than seven years into her art practice. “I think it’s something that’s been deeply ingrained in me, but that I was a little afraid to get near,” said Cheh, while adding that identity, often unintentionally, “does carry through the work.”
Typically made on a potter’s wheel, traditional moon jars are “very light, usually white, and made of porcelain,” according to Cheh. Her own nontraditional method includes hand-building the pieces and adding additional layers, which can take up to a few months to complete due to the gradual drying process.
Recalling ReflectSpace Gallery’s exhibit on the Korean “comfort women,” Cheh discussed feeling inspired by stools and their various traditional uses. The “closeness to the ground” reminds Cheh of her own upbringing in Korea, where grandmothers would often sit in a squat position, hovering over the floor.
Tying it back to her own diasporic experience, Cheh described the moment when, while in an architecture graduate program, her classmates asked her why she was squatting before a presentation. “Without even thinking about it,” Cheh was imitating the Korean grandmothers. Hovering over the ground gave her “some sort of comfort and strength,” she said.
“Going back to living in Korea with my family as a child, our dinners were always low to the ground,” Cheh said, adding that they “didn’t have Western chairs.” She recounted how her family would sit on the floor and eat together.
As an immigrant child in the United States, Cheh “wanted nothing but to get away from” her Korean identity. “You want to assimilate. You don’t want to be different or laughed at, because I know I was certainly laughed at, and it’s not a good feeling,” she said, while highlighting the inescapability of identity. “But then you become aware of certain things that are so close to you that you can’t run the other way.”
Artists featured in “(Be)Longing: Asian Diasporic Crossings” include Annette Miae Kim, Kyong Boon Oh, Sun Siran, Xia Yan, Gil Woong Kim, Donah Lee, and Jennifer Cheh.
An opening reception for “(Be)Longing” was held on Saturday, July 27 at ReflectSpace Gallery. An artist walk-through event will be held on Sunday, September 22 at 2 p.m., which is the final day the exhibition is on view. The gallery is inside the Glendale Central Library, located at 222 East Harvard, Glendale, CA, 91205.
To learn more about ReflectSpace Gallery, visit the website.
