This 3D pen sculpture “羞” captures my internal struggle of having to hide my queer identity from my family while growing up in Korea. This work has been exhibited at the Tufts Asian & Asian American New Year Gallery.
Lunar New Year Day was one of the two major holidays when my extended family gathered to spend a day and a night together. This gathering involved great food, familiar faces, and new family gossips, but meeting my relatives also meant that I would have to try harder to conceal my queerness and femininity. While there has always been an inherent love for my relatives, that love was intertwined with the feeling of shame and internalized homophobia.
Throughout history, many East Asian artists have used Chinese calligraphy as a medium of self-expression or introspection to capture their emotional experience at the moment. With a Chinese character “羞” that represents the feeling of shame, I wanted to project the two-dimensional motif to a three-dimensional space.
The four characters of “羞” that constitute this sculpture are almost caving in while being trapped by each other. As one walks around the sculpture, the tangled characters of shame momentarily reveal themselves, one after another, just before they conceal themselves yet again.
