Yun Ah
Studios
Mementos of my Korean Self
Souther invites the viewer into a conversation and to experience the adoptee struggles alongside her:
“This selected body of work examines home, family, culture & identity, as I’ve had to re familiarize myself with what these terms mean for an international adoptee. I often find myself imagining my birth family and what I would feel reconnecting with them. To reclaim this missing piece of myself, I documented my thoughts and feelings, as if replaying them from the 3rd person.
”Does the ‘self’ become a memento if the act of recalling makes you your own personal landmark?
Julianna Souther
Projects
The Corrine Woodman Gallery I shows work by Juliana Souther about her identity as a Korean adoptee.
Julianna Souther is a recent art graduate from Oregon State University where she examines her identity as a Korean adoptee with an American heritage. She approached racial or ethnic identity in a previous series, but here she concentrates mostly on her own origins.
Because Souther was adopted as a very young child, she experienced her young years as an American with a matching heritage. In this body of work Souther aims to reconstruct her Korean experiences, the ones for which she has no real memory. She says, “The selected artworks dive deep into my subconscious. They grab hold of my re-acquired memories since accepting my international adoptee identity and all the scars and hurt that come with it.”
Korean Dress, 2021
The traditional style of clothing, called Hanbok was popular back in historical Korea, when North and South Korea was one country. For women, it consists of a hooped skirt that goes to your ankles and a crop-top styled jacket made of fine silk. Men wore dark colored silk pants with a silk vest and jacket. This woodcut print pictures a korean woman in a Hanbok or a traditional Korean dress; it symbolizes my seperation of korean history, fashion and need for belonging within its rediscovery of my Korean identity.
The constant onslaught of Anti-Asian hate crimes during the early months of 2021 has disheartened many – within the Asian community, as well as in the general population. Yet this is not a new phenomenon; racism and xenophobia have been social problems since long before the 2021 hate crimes ever occurred. It is the cultural circumstances of these crimes – current as well as historical – which have inspired my current project, Asian Misidentification. This project aims to debunk how different Asian ethnicities are perceived and assigned to a particular discriminatory bubble. Although each individual’s story may differ in specifics, all are connected by the same thread, which is that the majority of people still appear to believe the statement, “all Asians look the same”.
When you hear the words “adopted, adoptee, or adoption”, are you aware of the diverse complexities associated with an adoptee’s experience? Voicing Adoption Diaspora is a documentary which recounts pivotal conversations on the topic of adoption trauma. This very personal project provides a space for adoptees, non-adoptees and prospective adoptive parents, to recognize matters of trauma as they relate to the adoptee narrative.
What is Saekdong?, 2019
Saekdong is a type of Hanbok (traditional korean clothing) and "refers to traditional Korean patchwork fabric consisting of stripes of bright colors based on the philosophical concept of the five elements and yin-yang." - https://portmanteauhome.com/blogs/news/what-is-saekdong
it tells the story of people of two cultures and the underlying complexities associated with identity. What is Saekdong?, delicately places a person's history through fabric design, and the stigma of "not american enough", or "not asian enough".
I find that the accordion-style book accurately shows each day I was away with a foster mother of my own, who treated me with tenderness. I have no other information on who she is, or what she looks like now. But I was fortunate to find that, in these beautiful photographs of myself growing up with a loving mother-figure, nonetheless. This book is for her, for myself, and for the hope of finding either her or my birth mother, in this daunting family search for belonging.
Learning Hangul, 2018
As we each think about our culture, and what it means to be an American, as well as Asian, Black, White or otherwise, our beliefs may shift as we revisit our own unique backgrounds. We discover what has contributed to our individual identity, in the places we’ve lived in and the road that we’ve made for ourselves. Learning Hangul is the first image that spoke to my inner self, and made me think, why I began to search for my 'missing' background.