k-art in bergen
Part I – Growing Up
I came to Norway when I was three months old in 1984. I was adopted to a loving Norwegian mother and father, with two younger adopted siblings that came two and four years later. I grew up on Sotra, an island on the outskirts of Bergen and our childhood was lovely, filled with nature, nurture and animals. It is a rural place and I was the first person of a different ethnicity at my elementary school. In high school there were more, and a few that had immigrated with their families. But all in all, it used to be a place with very few people of colour. As a kid I was naturally called “ching chong” and “chip chap,” and as a young adult, going out with friends, older men would tell me they had been to my homeland. Yet I never really struggled to find a place for myself, among friends, family, or in life more generally. People who know me very well tend to forget that I do not look like a typical white Norwegian, and they are often surprised when someone comments on it or treats me differently, whether while traveling or at home. I never forget.
I was always fond of drawing and painting, and after high school I studied for two years at Bergen Art School between 2004 and 2006 which led me to apply to the Bachelor program in Fine Art at Bergen Academy of Art and Design. I graduated from their Masters program in 2011. I ended up staying in Bergen, and have lived and worked here since then. For me it was a natural choice; it’s close to where I grew up, I had a big community of colleagues and friends here, and a closeness to both nature and the city, with an art scene that felt big enough.
As an art student I was interested in exploring topics related to my background as an adoptee. I looked to artists that worked with migration, different types of transnational experiences, diaspora and so on. I remember writing in my Masters thesis about Do Ho Suh and Kimsooja. I was interested in their poetic, conceptual and esthetic approach to working with displacement, movement, memory, mass and identity. For my own part, at that time being on an ongoing search for my own identity, it wasn’t a coincidence that both the artists were Korean.
I’ve been in touch with my biological family since 2005, when I got a letter from them, saying my biological mother, older sister and younger half-brother wanted to meet me. I was in my second year as an art student at Bergen Art School, and 21 years old. I visited them in 2013, and later on in 2015. We mostly lost touch, after my biological mother died in 2019. Meeting them has given me a background story I didn’t have before, and somewhere to look to for family history, familiar appearance, behaviour, common interests and body language. The cultural differences felt expansive, and the feelings connected to adoption, family, closeness and distance (emotionally and physically), sometimes easier to navigate, but often complex and complicated.
Becoming a mother, and also getting older, has shifted my perspective an important bit when it comes to my relationship with my biological family and Korean background; from being the child to becoming the parent, about loss and sacrifice, in a way that feels like it transcends nationality and culture. Artistically it has led me to engage more deeply with works that speak to life cycles, care, responsibility, descendants and predecessors, heredity and environment, and belonging. Although I don’t feel it necessary to let the audience in on my own private history in an exhibition setting.
Part II – Artistic Life in Bergen
I think there are several things I want to factor in as important cornerstones that contribute to the art scene in Bergen: the art schools, the bigger art institutions and museums, the mixture of some really good commercial and artist-run galleries, the art organizations (political and otherwise), the festivals and the artist studios. A lot of these are artist-run and non-profit, which I think encourages a sense of being a community that everyone can contribute to, and be a part of. Oh, and the weather! It rains a lot here. I think it makes you want to stay indoors and work more. Maybe.
Bergen is not a big city, and the surrounding mountains limit the city center to a certain size. It’s trying to expand, but it’s slow going, and like with a lot of newer building projects, there is little, if any room for pedestrians to experience anything of interest along the new areas. But it’s easy to navigate for new art-students and most likely you will meet a lot of colleagues and co-students if you’re going to an opening or an art-ish event of any sort.
There used to be a lot of artist-run galleries in run-down or cheap to rent places, but it’s getting more difficult to find spaces for this kind of activity, although there are still a lot going on. And most likely, since I’m over 40, a lot of that happens around the younger and hip art-scene that I don’t know about!
Over the years I’ve participated in a lot of collaborations, with local organizations, institutions, fellow students during my student days, and later on, colleagues. Besides my own artistic practice, I’ve worked with organizing and administering artist-studios, I was a project manager for an art-festival for five years, I’ve done a lot of teaching and administrative work at the art schools in Bergen and had several small odd jobs related to the local art-scene.
If you’re an artist who is looking to find that type of part-time job, I found it really helped me to take part in some self-organized projects, often together with others, to get experience and connections. There’s also something magical about seeing how much a group of people can create and shape together, to be a part of a common creative workflow.
Being in the studio can sometimes be a lonely thing. For me, working with other people can satisfy my need for social and professional input. Also, because my artistic process is often slow and meticulous, working with something that is very concrete, straight forward and often efficient can be very satisfying.
I haven’t really collaborated artistically with anyone, but I love being around people and seeing spaces for art and artists develop and come into existence. Like I mentioned before, with a smaller community it’s easier to navigate who does what and what happens where, and be an active part of it.
For the last couple of years I have collaborated with a local gallery, Høyersten Contemporary. It’s run by art historians Erlend and Simone Aalbæk Høyersten. For me, working with a gallery who can contribute with making connections, a fantastic space for exhibitions, everyday logistics, from shipping and packing to sales and discussing my artistic work, has been a very positive experience.
Part III – Korean Roots & City as Muse
In the studio I work primarily with painting and drawing. In recent years, I have worked mostly with charcoal, pastel, and acrylic on raw canvas. My work inhabits both drawn and painterly qualities, but can also be associated with hand-colored photographs and prints.
I often work in series, across varying formats and scales, ranging from small, intimate pieces to larger works that engage with the architecture of the exhibition space.
In recent years, I have focused on the environments that shaped me as a child and teenager as subject matter. Particularly the forest at a peninsula near my parents’ home on Sotra. I wanted to work with a place that I know well, yet which has always felt both deeply familiar and strangely alien at the same time. During my childhood, it served as the source of countless imagined worlds and adventures.
In the exhibition, “Bytting/Changeling” (2023), the central work in the exhibition, depicts an uprooted tree root. The figure in the painting is based on photographs I took of myself carrying one of my daughters on my back. Both the motif and the location have continued to occupy my artistic practice in recent years and in several of my exhibitions.
In my exhibitions “Gjengangere/The Returned” (2024) and “Etterbilder/After-Images” (2026) at Høyersten Contemporary, I also worked with nearly mirrored motifs that initially appear identical but reveal more or less subtle differences upon closer inspection. Alongside leaving certain silhouettes empty within the landscape, I began in “Gjengangere” to explore the possibility of allowing the landscape itself to grow forth human-like figures and beings.
In my solo exhibition “Gjenklang/Resonance” (2025) at Sogn og Fjordane Art Museum, I worked with references to traditions within landscape painting and the panorama. The motifs contain several human-like figures carrying something that may resemble children. These figures can be difficult to detect at first glance and may appear as an integral part of the landscape through which they move.
In April 2027, I will exhibit at Telemark Kunstmuseum. The museum has established a collaboration with the National Museum of Norway and the family of the painter August Cappelen (1827–1852), having permission to show a selection of his works for an exhibition that will bring our two artistic practices into dialogue.
I am interested in examining how both Cappelen and I have worked with a local landscape to which we have had a close personal relationship, and which we each interpret subjectively. I also find the juxtaposition compelling in light of the period during which Cappelen was active, particularly in relation to the question of who has the right to claim ownership of and define their own contemporary reality.
