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Conversation_Unfolded Stories (guest-creator: Jiyea Park)
AESJ "Activentions, Art and Social Justice Pedagogies"
This artwork is spreading and unboxing my story in a social-cultural transition that I have experienced for almost 2 years since I arrived at UGA in 2018 Summer. I have been consistently posting drawing-essay on my blog since 2017, and this visual mapping is a collection of drawing pieces and debris from 2018 to the first half of 2020 that have drawn for drawing-essay posts. As an international graduate student who came from South Korea, I use those pieces to portray the various changes and adaptations in my life as an individual (from Korea to the United States). The process includes language differences, differences arising from tacit/explicit conventions that have commonly used in each society, tacitly agreed compliance, processes that are growing by solving large and small problems of daily life, joys, and sorrows, continuous effort and positivity that can find comfort and hope amid difficulties, psychological problems. Also, it includes human relationships, solitude, and even bonding that arise from separation in physical distance and time.
In particular, for this exhibition, I invited Jiyea Park(a Ph. D student in Lifelong, Leadership, and Organization Development at UGA), a Korean student who lived together in the on-campus apartment at the beginning and interacted closely as a neighbor, to the artwork process. We gathered at the appointed time and place and shared our experiences in socio-cultural transition. And we mapped each other the images(Instagram story photos) that she had been making for documentation of life in UGA and my drawing-essay fragments. Our visual records, each of which created personally to reflect on each other's experiences, come together to interweaved the similarities, differences, and diverse levels of emotions and subtle nuances that each of them reveals.