L Gallery-Section A, CICA Museum
June 7-11, 2023
2023.06.07-11
A Bittersweet Diaspora
My art is the exploration of the Asian American diaspora from my perspective as a Korean American woman. The work is a collection of tangible depictions of memories and historical events. I organize my body of work by chapters which are: personal experiences, Korean American history, and my family’s past in Korea. As for the style of my work, I reference: minimalism, contour drawing, and literary vignettes. My art mediums are thread, muslin fabric, and paint. The work is presented in the forms of sewn text, sewn drawings, and sculpture. I visually portray my experiences using a contour drawing style and a limited color palette to abstract the images. This allows me to tell a story by its most rudimentary components: form and color. I use sewing as a method to access core memories, the needle is used to penetrate the surface of the fabric, which represents the ego. This art process is slow and forces me to take the time to reflect on my internalized memories and experiences.The physical form of the artwork is significant because it often is indicative of my relationship to the memory. Memories and objects that were experienced first-hand are conveyed three dimensionally, whereas distant memories or historical events are portrayed as flat sewn drawings. My goal as an artist is to provide an authentic perspective on the Asian American experience in the hopes that it helps to contribute to the validation of the experiences of other marginalized people.
Susie Callista Suh (b.Oct.31,1993) is an emerging Korean American artist from Philadelphia, PA. She attended the University of the Arts and has BFA with honors in Interdisciplinary art and a concentration in art therapy. Suh creates sewn images on canvas and soft sculptures. Her art exists to address her experience with the Korean American Diaspora. Her work sheds light on microaggressions and overt racism that she and her family faced and internalized. The themes of her work include: identity, memory, history, and grief. Suh presents her work as a collection of visual vignettes, which are categorized into three chapters: her personal memories, moments in Korean American history, and stories from her family’s past in Korea.
