On creating things that inspire you

How or when did you realize you would become an artist?

It’s hard to answer because generally being an artist versus being the artist that I am now, or what people understand of my work, is a shifty timeline.

I studied art all throughout college but never really made the commitment mentally or emotionally because I just didn’t know how it was going to pan out. The truth is that there is no answer to how it’s going to pan out. What happened was that my final semester of senior year, I thought, “Well, they can’t stop me from graduating. I did all my credits. They might not like my work I do now, but it’s too late.” And something about that took the pressure off and I made the work I wanted to and really got to deep dive into my interests, develop a quote, unquote, “studio practice.” And then in my exit critique, I was like, “Yeah, you know what? I think I do want to be an artist.” At that point I was 22. That should have been obvious, but I think I really just couldn’t commit until then.

How did you first find your love for kinetics? When did you start working with moving sculptures?

I was doing some soft sculpture stuff in my final year of school, and that was the work that I was like, “I feel free to make this. I don’t give a fuck anymore.” I was making these furniture pieces that were constructed out of soft upholstery foam, and then I surfaced them to look like marble because that was just this huge trend—everything was just marble everything. And I was really interested in that faux kind of sheen stuff. I was playing around with the sculptures and they just flopped over. They couldn’t stand. The point was that they were all surface and no structure. And they always had this animated quality to them. And there was just something so great about identifying emotions with an object. Like how can you have sympathy for something that’s not alive? After that, I just wanted to get things to start moving and see what motion could create. Because when I started, I loved seeing signs that spin around on the street; they kind of feel like they’re trying to perform like, “Come here! Come to the store!” Something about the movement just captures your attention.

Movement could be as simple as spinning, or things could be really chaotic or truly destroying themselves in the process of moving. Starting to show that work, I learned that people also felt that identification. Which I thought was really wonderful. And I’ve told myself, “You need to start making not-moving things, because you’re going to be broke because who’s going to buy shit that their cat wants to fight with in their home?” But I never really could go back to inert work. I never intended to be labeled a kinetic artist. And I think there’s a huge spectrum to even that term. But I like when a thing moves because that thing feels alive, like it has a personality.

It’s a little uncanny. Taste, the piece you just made for Art Basel with the little roller skates and everything…it was literally a person. Is that something that you strive for, giving your sculptures personalities?

A year ago I was just like, “This sculpture needs dog Crocs.” And since then I have ordered a weird amount of American Doll shoes and dog shoes because it’s funny how a little touch can make something just feel figurative.

I’m really cautious about giving something what looks like a face. But it’s a real phenomenon people experience, pareidolia—being able to find faces or identifiably human qualities in objects. I actually learned later that this happens to religious people more. Looking for signs or for Jesus in toast or something.

So yeah, they feel like characters. But it’s fun in the process of making them because I don’t always feel like I’m in total control of what that character is. And it’s really interesting to feel like the sculpture has some sort of agency. Obviously I’m the one making it; whatever weird 3:00 AM decisions in the studio are mine. But I’m often surprised by the work, and that keeps things fresh in the studio.

When I did my Berlin show, there were just so many roller skates and then somebody was like, “So why roller skates?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I think they dream of mobility or something.”

When we were on Fishers Island for the Lighthouse Works Residency, you salvaged sculpture parts from the town dump. I know you work with scrapped, used motors for your kinetic sculptures. Does this process of searching and reusing speak to the overall mission or vision of your work?

Getting to Fishers Island, I knew I was going to be limited. Of course, I mix found materials with ordering parts online; I have to. But it really was an extension of a practice I started for Gather. When I started sourcing massagers, I did so locally because I could shop online for massagers, but I can’t figure out how they work until I have the real thing in front of me and have taken it apart with a screwdriver. Then I was just driving around and going to the suburbs because the suburbs are where massager machines, exercise machines, and treadmills go to die.

And it became this fun way to get to talk to people too, those who were willing to. It also helps me to establish this weird knowledge of a place. Because I’ve moved around so much, I’ve never really felt ownership over calling somewhere a “hometown.” So this was my weird speckled visitation way of getting to know a place by just taking the things people didn’t want anymore.

I loved getting to see, even just on this small island that has a really kind of set population of people, the kind of stuff that gets regurgitated through people’s homes, what goes into the dump, what’s brought in, and what gets sent back to the mainland. It’s like digestion. The island is digesting stuff in this weird way.

Your bio says you source materials that have a history of aspiration and failure, which I think is a beautiful way to put it. Would you mind elaborating?

It extends from this basic idea of what you buy is a form of self-expression. I started thinking about that in the domestic space or like when you host people and what you want your home or lawn to virtue signal basically. It also came from my dad. We would go to Hobby Lobby together when I was a kid. I would go run off to the art supplies while he was in home decor. I don’t know what it was, but he just was buying a lot of replicas of famous art like the Venus de Milo, the David, etc. Hobby Lobby manufactures all these small plastic and plaster copies. I think it was his local and economic way to feel worldly, in the way people will travel abroad and bring back some souvenir that feels like an authentic slice of that place. But it was just not possible for us growing up, to travel and to bring back the spoils of those travels.

But they were all these things that were trying to point to higher culture. For me, thinking about my immigrant family, the American Dream, it was like: that’s aspiration. And I don’t necessarily work with that stuff symbolically, but in terms of the machines, the aspiration comes from comfort and from care and intimacy. A massager is a replacement for masseuse, a baby swing is a replacement for a nanny. It’s like there are these distilled functions that are just powered by cheap motors that perform one repetitive task over and over again. You’re just outsourcing that slice of labor to a machine. It’s very middle class.

I remember talking to a faculty member in grad school who pointed that out, where it was like, “Yeah, if you’re really wealthy, you hire the person. If you’re really poor, you do it yourself. And then if you’re in this weird middle-class zone, you find an appliance.” I thought that was so interesting. But the whole ability for me to source this stuff comes from the fact that somebody doesn’t want it anymore. And that’s the failure. It’s supposed to do a job, it somehow doesn’t meet the expectation, or it just falls out of use. A lot of people who sold me massagers say, “This is great. You press this button, it turns on this heating function. It’s really comforting, it’s really good.” And then I’m like, “So why are you getting rid of it?” And they reply, “I haven’t used it in five years.”

It has this promise it’s trying to deliver and it can’t. And I think that’s really sweet and endearing, something a lot of people can relate to. And that’s a part of the sympathy too; the object is not only what it’s expressing physically, but also through its emotional history. And I’m interested in how that connects to people’s relationships.

Your bio also mentions being haunted by your Korean immigrant father’s pursuit of the American Dream. How else does that show up in your work?

It’s being in America and how much of that is driven by commerce and by capitalism. And that’s why a lot of these things are failures, is because they’re also produced as dirt cheap as possible and they’re not fixable. And there’s kind of this distinction maybe, this is super simplistic, but of an America where things are well made and you know how to fix it and it’s very masculine. It’s like, “I’m going to change this, I’m going to fix this. I know how to work on my car.” And then there’s the other side of America, which is like, “Something’s wrong. I’m just going to buy a new one because it’s cheaper to do that or it’s too much effort to learn how something works.”

And I think for my family, they fell on that latter side of this American Dream that is about ease and shelling out the money to just buy a cheap replacement. And I’m having fun in my own scrappy way of figuring out how things work and how those translate to larger processes in engineering or manufacturing. There are so many products driven by motors, and a lot of them have similar mechanisms all across. And it’s so cool to see how even just something as simple as a motor mechanism extends to every part of our lives. But again, that’s really different from the American Dream that the rest of my family has.

Yeah, totally. Your lifestyle is like the opposite of the American Dream. You’re not married, you don’t have kids, you don’t have a chunk of land with a picket fence-

Lay it on me.

I mean, same. Anyway, part of this is that you’re living at residencies while waiting to hear back from others, and it sometimes takes months or even up to a year to know what’s next. How do you deal with all this uncertainty of where you’ll be next, this almost opposite of the American Dream?

It’s funny because I left the supposed promise of that security living in St. Louis. I really thought for a second it was going to be so easy to settle down there. But then while I was working full time, I once took all of my vacation days for the year to go to a one-month residency. And I don’t know, it’s this classic existential question, it’s like, “Is this what life is for? Am I going to work so I can do this?” I mean, of course the way that I’m living now is not super stable. It relies on a lot of generosity of others and vulnerability to ask people to crash with them or for a residency to accept me and be willing to lodge me and give me a studio and food and stuff like that, which is so amazing. Every day at the Lighthouse Works, I was just like, “How the hell did I make this happen for myself?”

This is also different from this kind of American-suburban, “I take care of just myself or my family, my own kind of nuclear family unit and behind my closed doors of my suburban home, this is my world” attitude. Again, I’m simplifying. But I also think that with massagers or just the machines, they’re also meant to replicate the experience of intimacy or the relationship of working with other people, but privately because you don’t have to talk to your machine when you run it or whatever; you don’t have to be touched by another person in a massage or have that kind of brush up with humanity. So living this way and relying on other people is constantly forcing me to work against that I-take-care-of-me-and-only-me mentality.

I’m not totally denouncing suburban life. It’s really not about that. I remember my friend telling me that being an artist is the ultimate form of assimilation. And I had to really think about that one because, to me, assimilation was always something I had a complex relationship to by growing up in America because I was like, “Do I want to blend in or do I not? Do I have to kill parts of my identity or culture to do that?”

But the way he talked about it was that there’s this classic immigrant narrative of: your family comes over, they work really hard, they send you to school and you go be a doctor and a lawyer, a professor, you build up from there. And there’s something about being an artist where it’s not like you’re throwing that sacrifice away, but it’s like you’re living to be free and to not have a plan and to have that privilege, I think, is really cool.

I don’t know if I agree with that necessarily, but it’s just a thought I’ve been chewing on where it’s like because it is such a privilege to be able to move around and experience these places and get to really for, not a long time, but at least a few months, get to know places like Fishers Island and then leave before things become really monotonous…it allows me to exercise being an aimless, American boy or something. But yeah, it’s chaotic as hell. It’s a lot of work to put together. And it will not be forever. But for now it’s been cool. I got to meet you so it’s worth it.