My current series, The Beauty of Stitching Sorrow (The Last Threads of Colonial Empire), emerges from a sustained engagement with sambe, a traditional Korean hemp cloth historically associated with mourning. According to textile conservator, Min-Sun Hwang, sambe was once worn by bereaved families for extended periods, signaling both personal loss and communal ritual. I began working with sambe in 2019 following the death of my adoptive father. Estranged from my adoptive family and unable to participate in conventional mourning, I turned toward native Korean funerary practices to navigate grief, epigenetic trauma, and the fractured legacy of transnational adoption.
Earlier works like Unfinished Business (2019) and The Postcolonial Afterlives of Han (2021) explore sambe as a surrogate for the body. In Unfinished Business, plastic body bags—filled with sambe and other textiles and suspended in space—form haunting sculptural assemblages that speak to unresolved mourning In Postcolonial Afterlives of Han, I juxtaposed Meta-Suŭi Funeral Hanbok (2021) with a historical Joseon Dynasty funeral hanbok from the Pacific Asia Museum’s collection. Other works, such as Great Full Moon (2020) and Three Moons (2020), reflect oncultural loss through the lens of the lunar calendar and Korean cosmologies.
The title Postcolonial Afterlives of Han draws from Sandra Soo Hee Chi Kim’s critical reframing of han (恨)—a term often translated as collective sorrow or grief, and frequently romanticized as a unique marker of Korean identity. Kim and others argue that han, as popularly understood, was shaped by Japanese colonial ideologies that cast Koreans as innately meek, naïve, and sorrowful, thereby justifying their subjugation under Japanese rule.
In 1920, Japanese art critic Yanagi Muneyoshi—later known by his philosopher name, Yanagi Sōetsu—described Korean art as possessing an “aesthetics of sorrow.” This characterization participated in a colonial discourse that rebranded Korean crafts as spiritually rich precisely because they were seen as humble, melancholic, and tragic. He later coined the term “sorrowful beauty” (悲哀の美), further aestheticizing this imposed narrative. Kim argues that this concept—deeply embedded in Japanese scholarship on Korea—reveals how colonialism reshaped Korean art to reinforce power hierarchies. She asks, “How did the Japanese imposition of ‘the beauty of sorrow’ translate into han as the so-called ‘Korean ethos’?” Her essay makes the case that han was ultimately absorbed into a biologically inflected ethnonationalist discourse in which, she writes, “the colonized co-opted the language of the colonizer,” and that “nationalist Koreans … latched on to the racialized differences already available in the colonial sphere as symbols of identity that pushed against the pressures of assimilation and ethnic erasure.”
Scholars like Choi Yeon-woo have also noted that sambe’s role in mourning may have been formalized under colonial rule, becoming a significant part of funeral ritual. With this in mind, what does it mean as an adoptee to grieve an erased identity, one partially shaped by colonizers? Can art create space for mourning and healing where it has been denied? These questions guide the current series, which threads together loss, resilience, and cultural erasure while confronting how colonialism, militarism, forced migration, and adoption are woven into my personal narrative. The works incorporate sambe alongside indigo-dyed linen, embroidery, sewing, and photo transfers. Archival images—often taken by Western male photographers documenting Korean women and landscapes—are collaged with fabric scraps and material fragments I’ve gathered over time. These textile compositions reflect the difficulty of constructing identity without ancestral continuity. I also engage with the poetic yet problematic term “sorrowful beauty (悲哀の美)” to highlight how native Koreans, too, have pathologized and aestheticized the lives of overseas adoptees—an ironic transferal that reveals how the colonized may become the colonizers.
My inspirations span Korean bojagi traditions and the brilliant improvisational quilts of the Gee’s Bend community in the American South. Like them, I understand quilting not only as aesthetic form, but as an act of survival and resistance. I invoke these practices to connect my experience as one of 200,000 South Koreans forcibly sent abroad with that of diasporic Africans whose ancestors were violently separated from their families, languages, and lands. My own Korean mother never legally consented to my adoption, and I carry no inherited knowledge passed down through kin. Still, I see profound power in forging new cultural traditions within diasporic communities. In my work, stitching becomes a way to survive sorrow, to name loss, and to reclaim beauty from the fragments we inherit, as my textile work literally and metaphorically grapples with according to anthropologist Eleana Kim, “the challenge of constructing identities and places of belonging out of bits and fragments.”
