The work is a floor piece that acts as a proxy for a Korean body lying on the ground, reflecting on the gradual disappearance of certain everyday customs, such as sleeping on the floor, as domestic life shifts under modernization and global influence. Cultural Insomnia consists of individual transcultural objects transformed through artistic intervention, a method the artist often uses to move ethnological materials into the space of sculpture.

The bamboo “wife,” traditionally used as a cooling body pillow during humid seasons, appears frequently in RHEE’s work, most notably in the installation series Seven Sisters. In this staging it wears a sports visor associated with contemporary beauty practices that protect the skin from sun exposure, historically linked to classed ideas of leisure and respectability. A related earlier work, There’s no place like home (Korea), includes rubber shoes styled after danghye, footwear associated with upper-class women, here painted silver and embellished with synthetic gemstones and crocheted wool. Rubber shoes themselves entered Korea during the colonial period (1910–1945). The shift from ruby red to silver references the literary version of The Wizard of Oz rather than the film adaptation.

In Korean folklore, giving shoes can symbolize the possibility that the recipient will leave. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s shoes allow her to return home. Following the end of Japanese colonial rule and the period of U.S. military administration, more than 200,000 Korean children were sent abroad through intercountry adoption. Accounts from adult adoptees describe receiving such shoes from agencies, objects that echo this symbolism of departure.

The artist coined the term “K-Orphans” to refer to children classified as orphans within Korean family registries and immigration documentation, regardless of their actual family circumstances. Having been recorded in this way in RHEE’s file, later discovered contained significant irregularities and is now being legally challenged, the artist includes commoner straw shoes, jipshin, to evoke imposed status and a working-class American upbringing. Finally, miniature 3D-printed danghye accumulate references to colonial history, technological reconstruction of displaced artifacts, and the idea of return to a place that has changed beyond recognition.