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DHS: Once my fortuneteller [br]told me that I have five horses

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and that means that I travel a lot.

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So I’m basically destined to leave [br]home and live somewhere else.

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I think I wanted to leave [br]home because of my father.

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He’s a successful painter.

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Somehow I felt that his fame

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overshadowed me and I wanted to do my own thing.

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You know, New York is crazy, really really noisy.

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And I couldn’t sleep that well.

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And I was thinking when it was my [br]last time to have a really good sleep

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and that was back in Korea. [br]

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So, I thought, like, how am [br]I going to bring that space.

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And physically it is impossible,

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so I came up with this idea [br]of transportable fabric.

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I want to carry my house, my home,

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with me all the time, like a snail.

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My house project, Seoul Home/LA Home,

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is a replica of the interior of my parent’s house.

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I grew up in the house.

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It’s a very traditional Korean house.

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My father built the exact replica [br]of this famous traditional building.

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I just didn’t want to sit down and cry for home.

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I just wanted to more actively [br]deal with the issues of longing. [br]

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My mom helped me to find national treasures,

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basically people who keep traditional techniques,

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craftsmanship, things like that.

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Those ladies taught me how to sew certain seams.

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There’s an expression in [br]Korea “You walk the house.”

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People actually disassemble the house

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and then rebuild in a different location.

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So I had to make something that [br]you could put in a suitcase

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and bring it with me all the time.

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I was able to discover so many things

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when I was measuring and that was really personal

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and a kind of emotional experience.

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You often finds like little [br]marks you did when you were a kid

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and that brings all the [br]memories of your childhood.

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And when you go through that process,

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the space becomes really a part of you.[br]

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I really like this idea of my art [br]becomes a part of the architecture.

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It started from my interest [br]in the notion of space, [br]

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particularly this notion of personal space,

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or individual space.

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Seoul is very crowded city,

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and on the street people bump into each other.

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And you know, somebody could just,

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you know, hit your shoulder.

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And that’s normal.

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But I realize that’s different here.

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So my perception of this personal [br]space has, I think, changed.

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It was just for me very natural to [br]think about the interpersonal space,

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the working at table space between people.

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And so that’s how this idea of individual

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and the collective came in.

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I intentionally chose that pose.

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If you look at the figures’ facial expressions,

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they don’t look oppressed.

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So it has kind of like a positive gesture,

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but what they’re doing is [br]actually just bearing weight.

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And I don’t really make any statement on that,

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its just really up to the viewer.

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I was asked to do some public [br]sculpture in this public place

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and I started to think about [br]what it means, public space,

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and what’s the meaning of public art or monument.

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I tried to re-think this whole notion of monument.

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…make sure it is polished very well.

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I want it to be very shiny…

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Usually, its bigger than life size [br]individual, illustrious figures.

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But what I did was I took it down,

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and make it smaller and make it into multiples.

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I just want to recognize anonymous,

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everyday life, people who pass that space.

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For me it was more important actually

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coming from Korea to the United States,

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and that kind of displacement, [br]the cultural displacement,

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allowed me to compare two different cultures.

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So I was able to actually look back

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and think about these issues of the individual

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and the collective.

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I scanned the portraits of sixty students

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from my high school year book into the computer.

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And I put my face first

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and the rest superimposed on top of each other

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so it creates this average of one class.

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In a way it’s self-portrait.

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I collected yearbooks from 1970 to 1993

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or something like that

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and I see same face from different year books,

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so maybe we are not that unique.

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I was curious what we share and what we don’t,

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and how this sort of individuals converge. [br]

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The whole Korean society is actually [br]based upon this kind of militaristic,

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very hierarchical structure.

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When you finish your elementary school [br]you enter middle school in Korea.

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That’s probably the age of 13.

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Then you shave your hair.

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And then you have uniform

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And it came as some kind of [br]trauma for most of the kids.

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And also you are called by numbers,

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you know number 37 or something like that.

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My number was 46.

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–Ok, ready?…

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Koreans, they all have this kind of nostalgia,

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this kind of personal attachments to the uniform.

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I mean it’s the funny thing about the uniform

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because we hated to wear that uniform.

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It’s very strict and if you don’t [br]follow that uniform, you’re punished.

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But we tried our best to differentiate [br]our uniform from one another.

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From the moment you are born,

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you know you are going to be in the military

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because everybody has to go.

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So that’s a great deal of [br]the Korean men’s identity.

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I was in the army for almost two years.

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It was quite important part of my life

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and I think it just comes out in my work.

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I found this army surplus store

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and the owner happened to be this old Korean guy.

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And he have a lot of free dog tags

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and allowed me to use this special [br]typewriter to type dog tags,

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you know letters and numbers.[br]

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Every man talks about his own [br]experience in the military,

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you know when you have a drink.

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And they’re unbelievable stories.

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I was really good at many things.

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I was a sharp shooter and I had [br]a black belt before the military

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and I could run really fast and [br]that was you know very helpful.

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But the program was basically push

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your psychological and physical to extreme,

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so actually you can kill someone.

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I really sort of experienced [br]what it means to be dehumanized.

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So for me like everything was [br]something to think about.

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In my work I can let other [br]people see things differently.

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I think this desperate sense [br]of displacement gives me space

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to have some kind of critical [br]distance to everything.