featured artists
lost and found
Dig deep into heritage with artist, Michelle Jeehye Chun.
Raised in the heart of one of the largest Korean diasporic communities in Los Angeles, Michelle Jeehye Chun grew up in a world shaped by juxtapositions. From towering mountains and sun-scorched deserts, to the echo of Sunday hymns in Korean churches and the allure of Hollywood razzle and dazzle beyond, the duality of cultures, landscapes, and histories form the foundation of her artistic practice. At the same time, Michelle’s belief in God remains a guiding force, encouraging her to view the world with a constant sense of wonder and reverence.
To describe her experience of cultural hybridity, Michelle turns to jjamppong, a Chinese-Korean noodle dish known for its chaotic blend of flavors. In colloquial Korean, the word also means a hodgepodge, an apt metaphor for the inheritance of fragmented memories, unarticulated histories, divided homelands, cultural nostalgia, and underdeveloped narratives that constitute the immigrant experience.
In Table Assemblage (2020-2021), a lacquer table from the Korean Joseon Dynasty sits at the center, contrasted with an abstracted yellow Western-style counterpart. A fish, an allusion to Picasso and Matisse, floats through the composition, while a traditional hanok lingers in the background, forming a carefully curated collision of East and West, tradition and modernity, belonging and estrangement. Similarly, in her An Archive (2021) piece, Michelle experiments with sand and oil ground to evoke the textures of ancient frescoes, embedding an old photograph of her grandmother beneath layers of symbols and graffiti-like markings.
Michelle’s creative process is much like an archaeological dig, where layers of history and meaning are built up, erased, and reimagined over time. In her painting, Sign of Jonah (2020-2021), she began with an image of her late grandmother as a young woman, only to obscure and then replace it with alternative scenes. The final image rests atop a buried history of figures, memories, and moments. Without realizing it at the time, she was grieving through her work, tracing her grandmother’s life and, in doing so, accepting the unknowable aspects of her story.
