Do Not Draw a Red Star (2022) is painted paper cutouts that reflect a formative memory from my childhood in South Korea and adulthood of being an immigrant in the US. My childhood in the ’80s was under a military dictatorship in which a lethal spy war with North Korea had actively engaged. Looking back, I remembered that drawing a red star was implicitly prohibited in art class due to anti-communist education. A few chances I could draw intense red stars was in the propaganda poster contest: I was good at it and made me dream of becoming an artist, which was the wrong idea of what an artist does. For the series, I integrated various shapes and texts from the two cultures to map traversing times and places that are not neighbors. The cutouts include folklore imagery from Korean ancestry, family stories tied to the division of the homeland, and protests denouncing racism in the migrated land.
