david heo
A Third Culture Collage
Experience life at the intersection of East and West with collage artist, David Heo.
david heo
A Third Culture Collage
Experience life at the intersection of East and West with collage artist, David Heo.
A native of the state of Georgia, David Heo holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and now resides in the heart of the Windy City’s artistic hub.
David is heavily influenced by his parents, in particular their enduring capacity to effortlessly combine elements of the “American” experience into their identities as first-generation immigrants. He also appreciates their commitment to preserving and passing on Korean traditions to their children, in turn forging a pathway along which he could openly explore his hybridized identity as a Korean-American artist. Nowadays, David is able to draw upon two cultural access points with ease, flicking both switches in unison, and navigating the intersections of Eastern and Western lived experiences as he goes.
For David, collage is a medium that reflects aspects of the self as well as the dualities of heroism and conflict that underscore American and Korean histories and folklore. Indeed, painting, drawing, ripping, and cutting out pieces from a single source, only to repeatedly add them to another until they crystallize into a seamless whole, is a poignant and poetic process that mirrors the third-culture human experience of identity formation and belonging.
In the end, it is the subtle votives and vibrant stories that emerge from David’s layered works that stop the viewer in their tracks, inviting them into a one-of-a-kind and affectionately choreographed dance between abstraction and biography.
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Discover more of David’s works in Issue 4 of our magazine!
