I know this seems silly, but I realize that not everyone really understands why I'm doing this. At its most obvious would be because I was adopted from Seoul. However this trip (I hope) will go beyond simply just addressing unanswered questions about my herritage. This year in Korea will investigate some pretty complicated personal, intellectual, and artistic questions that I have involving Korea. Many birds will be killed with this one stone. In fact this upcoming year with be like the WMD of birds.
I'm happy to leave the lab and finally spend the bulk of my hours thinking and doing things that will be related to my ultimate career goals in the arts. (I'm sure the MFA admissions committee would be like, Nature Chemical Biology what?) I hope to be a university professor of fine arts someday and this year will definitely give me teaching experience and test my ability of empathy for my students.
I'm very interested in better understanding the contemporary art scene in Korea. However Korea's arts are not very accessible to English speakers and for this reason it is imperative to physically go to Korea in order to carry out this investigation. But if one is to understand the contemporary psyche of Korean artists, the mass culture has to be understood first, as art does not exist in a vaccuum. And even in order to navigate within the art world there my language facility must drastically improve, and so the manner in which ETAs are culturally immersed will only facilitate this.
The process of cultural immersion will also help me answer personal questions about my birthplace, as I've never been back to Korea since leaving it at age 3 months. However there will be a great disconnect with my being ethnically Korean and culturally American (er, a true masshole). Having a conceptual and artistic interest in the Other, it will also be enlightening to experience for the first time in my life being a part of the ethnic majority and moving the minority status to my cultural upbringing. As a child even though I had a thick Boston accent, I had experienced being treated as someone who was inherrently different, and in some cases a second class citizen. It's taken years to regain back that sense of azian pride, and so I hope that I will be able to answer some of the questions that I've had about a culture that I until now have never been able to get to know intimately.
