‌40$ec is an installation inspired by my social and political identity in 2016 while living in the Bay Area. I look at the two countries I am deeply tied to, American and Korea, and find myself lost in between. Most times, I cannot distinguish myself from the labels assigned to me—immigrant, low income, woman, artist, exported Korean—or the feelings of being dehumanized by the immigration system, by economic hierarchies, and by the capitalist system. 

‌The Feelings of being dehumanized by the immigration system, by economic hierarchies, and by the capitalist system. It extends and grows when I pass by “Help” written on cardboard, when my employer spends $800,000 for a gala dinner and fails to pay the janitors for overtime, when I walk by the location where three Oakland Police men shot a woman in the back, when Facebook tells me to agree to something that I have no way of negotiating or understanding, and when my government kills 304 people in order to redirect its people’s attention‌. 
I arrived at the Oakland airport from South Korea in 2006. I didn’t really know this country. There was a clear sense of where I was from; I was Korean, visiting United States. It was as if there was an invisible string attached to me from Korea. After a year and a half, I moved to Baltimore and started to learn the language and culture. America was exciting, people were friendly, everything was new and different. I was an Asian for the first time in my life. I found my racial identity refreshing amongst a vast map of races in a new country. With or without trying, I assimilated, and the more I assimilated and became familiar, the thinner the string became.
Along the way, I found myself detached from Korea. When I thought of Korea I started thinking of it as its geopolitical history more than the voices of my family and friends, its economic relations to America instead of the smell of summer. When I try to find myself in America, I see myself as an immigrant, a “non-resident,” and now I don’t find it so refreshing to be a person of color. My work investigates this feeling of dehumanization. I stand between two worlds, and both seem chaotic.‌
2016. Y