Artist Statement

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Unable to transition my gender due to pressure from family and society, I repeatedly paint myself as a woman. Through painting, I explore my own feminine energy, my desires, and the beauty of the feminine.
In a similar and opposite way to the penis envy described by Sigmund Freud, I came to desire to have female breasts that I myself lacked, yet I feel that the male sexual organs are like an alien octopus latched onto my pelvis. From a young age, I pretended to dislike girls, even though I wanted to become a girl myself, whom I would draw secretly as me (and throw away in fear of being found out.)
How do I truly know who I am and what I want to become, if I am a virgin and have never had the chance to fully articulate my sexuality by actualizing it in physical reality? The state of virginity and questioning becomes not only a temporary and transitory state but also a form of continuous identity in and of itself until it is broken, even as I fear with sadness that I will remain a virgin forever. 
Investigating the feminine beauty in the realm of hybridity allows me to push and pull the multitude of beauty norms, preferences, and fantasies. I often paint from my imagination because I am trying to depict a form of beauty that is ideal to me that I can perceive within my mind, shaped by my own aesthetic sensibilities and instincts. What often results is a negotiation of anatomical forms and features of beauty that resist racialization, and hybrid cultural and racial identity that may reflect the cosmopolitan metropolis in which I am fully immersed.
What is feminine beauty? What is feminine as opposed to the masculine? For me, the two directions in the spectrum of gender are like symbols, similar to the bathroom signs. The masculine sign is rectangular, while the feminine sign is circular and/or triangular. Signs are essentially actors in the psychological theater, who perform their roles according to the expectations of their signs, almost like stereotypes. 
In a metaphor that I conjure, the tiger tacitly desires to become the rabbit, while the rabbit secretly wants to become the tiger. The symbol of the tiger contains the codes for power, while the symbol of the rabbit contains the codes for fragility. (But fragility invites the need for protection, which in effect can be a greater form of power.) Born in 1991 in South Korea, my psyche and preconceptions around gender and beauty coalesced at a time when traditional beliefs and stereotypes were prevalent. As a child, I automatically associated the masculine attractiveness with strength and the feminine beauty with fragility, and they possibly secretly desired to be the rabbit rather than the tiger. 
A model for my gender fluidity includes the Japanese onnagata, the male actors of artful femininity in Kabuki theater. Contrary to the theory of Judith Butler's gender performativity, the onnagata have an on-and-off switch enabling them to perform the image of womanhood and return to their male forms off-stage. It is a different kind of gender formation, in which repetition of gendered acts sees many interruptions. In my paintings, I am a happy, healthy, beautiful, energetic, intelligent, sexy, and powerful woman.