The Korean Cultural Center Washington, D.C. is proud to present 'Patchwork of Elsewhere', a new exhibition of works by Gina Bae, Timothy Hyunsoo Lee, Sookkyung Park, and Yu-Ching Wang that deconstructs and attempts to redefine the familiar notions of home and belonging.
In a world characterized by fluidity and change where constants seems persistently elusive, the idea of home often drifts somewhere between memory and reality. Home can be both a structure we inhabit and a feeling we chase—something defined not only by walls and roofs but by a disparate assemblage of language, culture, past lives, and imagined futures.
Patchwork of Elsewhere traces this intangible architecture of what makes a mere place truly a home—or not. For many, fond memories of home can also be a source of discomfort when coupled with displacement, longing, or mere provisional belonging. Family, like home, can also be defined in either physical or psychological terms, and the absence of either can be keenly felt. This exhibition investigates these issues within the ever-shifting context of human migration, adaptation, and cultural hybridity in an attempt to redefine a sense of belonging.
Artists Gina Bae, Timothy Hyunsoo Lee, Sookkyung Park, and Yu-Ching Wang represent a constellation of creative styles that powerfully evoke the condition of being elsewhere—apart from home and belonging. Each artist, shaped by their cultural background and personal narrative, shares a portrait of life lived in between homes, cultures, and feelings of belonging. Such experiences are both deeply challenging and yet generative of new possibilities.
About the Artists
Gina Bae’s paintings weave together traditional Korean folk motifs with speculative, figurative landscapes, creating visual spaces where the stories of two generations—hers and that of her first-generation immigrant parents—overlap as both familiar and unfamiliar snapshots. She experiments with fusing the traditional Korean minhwa art style and her experience growing up as a second-generation Korean American, affording herself a fluid definition of cultural heritage.
Timothy Hyunsoo Lee deconstructs bodily and emotional terrain, visualizing the dissonant paths of immigration and queer embodiment. His work explores the rituals, anxieties, and material memories of navigating between cultures while seeking a home within a politicized and ever-shifting body.
Sookkyung Park crafts delicate paper sculptures inspired by the overlapping eaves of traditional Korean hanok architecture but which carry multiple layers of meaning. Her work reinterprets both the structural designs and the tactile memory inherent in hanji, Korean traditional paper, as a means of revisiting personal histories of home, memory, and migration. Through meditative acts of folding and layering, she transforms paper into vessels of remembrance, connecting past and present across geographies.
Yu-Ching Wang conducts documentary research into the urban presence of migrant communities, presenting poetic yet grounded reflections on how people claim spaces and visibility in their own unique ways in once unfamiliar cities.
Patchwork of Elsewhere gathers together these disparate artistic practices with intentionality to form a single collective from distinct fragments of human experience. Rather than striving for a resolution to these challenges, the exhibition embraces the dissonance of being “elsewhere” and reframes incompleteness as a viable alternative to a singular, stable notion of home. In seeking out new ways to belong, even temporarily, Bae, Lee, Park, and Wang collectively create an ephemeral landscape where viewers might even encounter echoes of their own untold stories and unresolved feelings among the fragments of others.
All those who have ever felt at home, adrift, or anywhere in between are invited to step into this artistic space that celebrates fluidity over permanence, connection over ownership, and placemaking over rootedness.
Selected Artwork Details
배지나 Gina Bae
I Am a Fairy and Everything Is Run by Woodcutter Fantasies
2024
Oil on canvas, 48” x 36”
이현수 Timothy Hyunsoo Lee
TrueView (Overexposed)
2023
cyanotype on fabric, 48" x 60" each
박숙경 Sookkyung Park
The Sun
2023
Folded Paper, Acrylic & Spray Paint, 31” x 31” x 8” (H)
왕유칭 Yu-Ching Wang
Pigeonese
2022
Video and performative action, single-channel, color, with sound, video duration: 15 min 35 sec