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I believe that art should touch viewers without providing any statements about artwork. I also believe that an effective piece of artwork will contain a concept of the artist’s true experience, fine craftsmanship and a strength that will itself evoke an understanding in the audience. Art is a visual communication tool and it can be a curative process, through creative acts.
I have lived in three different cultures and the cross-cultural experience makes me question myself about who I am and where I am. Through creating artworks, I wish to share preliminary observations on the relationship between migration, as a quasi-physical and documentable sets of behaviors, and a particular post-migration quandary, the identity question of “Who am I?” or “Where am I?”
Born in Korea where I lived through adolescence, I had the good fortune to be exposed as an adult to two other and different cultures, Japanese and American. The amalgamation of all these migrations has fueled my passion for exploring artistically the many tensions involved in confirming one’s cultural and personal identities. As I began to reflect on my cultural and my artistic migrations, as I venture into the creation of new works and as I venture into exploring innovative ways of framing new or old concepts, I began to experience tension and I see tension as an outcome of migration. It certainly has been omnipresent in my nomadic life and in my ever-drifting art. I definitely witnessed, and still witness, tension in my endless, it seems, quest to understand the question of Identity.
TeaYoun Kim-Kassor is originally from South Korea where she received her B.F.A. in Fiber Arts at Sungshin Women’s University in Seoul. She continued her research in Art Education as the Japanese equivalent of a Fulbright Scholar at Saitama University in Japan where she earned an M.A.T. In America, TeaYoun continued her exploration of fine arts in the M.F.A. program at the University of Tennessee with a focus on installation. Currently, she is teaching as an Associate Professor of Art at a Georgia College in GA, U.S.
TeaYoun has been a very active artist having numerous exhibitions including at the Korean Cultural Center – Embassy of the Republic of Korea, Washington DC, University of South Carolina Beaufort, SC, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MoCA), GA, Venice Printmaking Studio in Murano Italy, La Macina di San Cresci in Florence, Italy, Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY, Montana State University Gallery in Bozeman, MT, Maryville College Gallery in Maryville, TN, Black-box Theatre in Milledgeville, GA, Folklore Museum in Sendai, Japan and etc. Her artwork has been supported by the Folklore Museum in Sendai, Japan, the National PerformanceNetwork (supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation), CESTA in Tabor, Czech Republic, and Can Serrat in Barcelona, Spain.