In the Hyphen

Everyone possesses certain cultural identity. But what if you belonged to more than one culture? Would you feel at home anywhere? I am interested in investigating the liminal space between cultural identities through photography and video.

In the Hyphen is a photography and video project that explores living in between cultures through the depiction of spaces between buildings and places of transit. Being bicultural and bilingual places you in a unique position of straddling two different cultures and living in a nebulous and unidentifiable state that is neither one nor the other. It is a fluid state where two cultures either merge or collide, and often requires a constant switch between two fixed states.

For this project, I’ve photographed spaces between buildings that do not have addresses and are under-utilized. They go unnoticed and uncared for. My photographs reclaim these abandoned spaces and mark their existence, thereby celebrating the undefined state of living interstitially. I also photographed places of transit where people pass through while commuting from point A to point B. Often, the places and time involved in transit are considered unimportant and people place greater emphasis on the points of departure and destination. But I have highlighted these under-appreciated spaces and time as being representative of bicultural existence.

One of the concepts behind my project is negative space and time. As Rachel Whiteread explores negative space inside and surrounding objects with her sculptures, I study the negative space between buildings and locations, and negative time spent in transit with my photographs and videos.

As a Korean-American, I lead a bicultural and bilingual life. I often shift from one language to another and adapt my attitude to fit the cultural situation at hand. This transition can be fluid or jagged. Sometimes I blend both languages and cultural attitudes. There is a hyphen between Korean and American in the term “Korean-American.” It is this hyphen that I am interested in.

Although this project begins with a personal starting point, it can be applied universally to American identity. Apart from the indigenous people, all Americans have heritages that stem from outside of America, and many indigenous people have adopted Americanness to their identity. Americans carry liminal identities within ourselves that make us adaptable and multifaceted, but at the same time they could produce a sense of loss and wavering. My work reveals these ambiguities and aims to promote a better understanding of our collective identity.