Signs and Symbols

2023-2025

 Signs and Symbols

I immigrated to the United States from South Korea when I was seventeen, and acquired English as my second language. 

English fascinated me because I couldn’t understand it. Growing up in Korea, using a language was implicit—it was something I just knew. Octavia Butler said that “most Humans lose access to old memories as they acquire new ones. They know how to speak, for instance, but they don’t recall learning to speak. They keep what experience has taught them—usually—but lose the experience itself.” 

Learning a new language, when my cognitive framework was already formed, allowed me to see that using different languages shifts the ways I see and interact with the world. This awareness was affirmed once again when I decided to pursue science instead of art in college. Science education taught me to observe and interpret the world critically, albeit less imaginatively. This ability to build new mental models of the world using different languages could expand our cognitive empathy, an important step toward building trust and strengthening relationships through expanded understanding of how others see and interact with the world. 

These paintings interrogates competing languages and orthographies—sets of conventions for language. The paintings feature a set of synthetic symbols representing the elemental shapes of Korean, English, and Mathematical signs. These synthetic symbols invite the audience to examine their own multiple cognitive structures and mental gymnastics we perform everyday to translate our inner thoughts to produce meaning and establish communication. 

The paintings with pipes containing these synthetic symbols and portals through which they flux among different realms illustrate the effects of competing linguistics and orthography on our cognitive framework as we interact with the external world. I invite the audience to expand their minds about the social structure and sociology of a multilingual existence.