Gyopo Portraits (2018-ongoing) are embossed relief prints on white paper portraying Korean immigrants from communities in which I live and work—including neighbors near my home, artist friends in NYC and Denver, and my former students at USF in Tampa.
Gyopo is a Korean word that means Korean emigrants and their descendants who live outside of Korea. Among other terms, Gyopo has a connotation that the link between them and their home country has been lost or weakened. The embossing makes the individual immigrant portrait hard to see and enhances the notions of void and simplicity of white-on-white—the Korean traditional aesthetics established during the Confucian Joseon Dynasty. The work can also be a political commentary on the immigrants’ sociopolitical instability and diasporic identity: being inside and outside and being brave and vulnerable at once. For most new prints, I extend the project by including other minority women immigrants.
