Attachment/Detachment, 1994-1996,

Slide projection, color transparencies, wood, fiber, 17 ft. X 20 ft. X 15 ft.

Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, CA, 1996

“Surrounded by hanging banners, a round table and four bench-like light boxes are geometrically arranged in the center of a dark, quiet room. Ceiling mounted projectors display a dissolving sequence of the definitions of the word 'home' in English and Korean, and the excerpts from Gaston Bachelard' s Poetics of Space onto the surface of the table. It presents an environment of two disparate and equally valid realities that allows constant shifting and reconciliation between two countries, two languages, and two memories. The images on the light boxes are of landscapes, both intimate and remote, to convey absence and presence, center and horizon, inside and outside.”

•Outside and inside are both intimate- they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility. If there exists a border-line surface between such an inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides.

* Every object invested with intimate space becomes the center of all space. For each object, distance is the present, the horizon exists as much as the center.

Attachment/Detachment, Slide projection, color transparencies, wood, fiber, 17 ft. X 20 ft. X 15 ft. Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, CA, 1996

The perimeter of Attatchment/Detachment  is defined by a suspended black wooden frame which forms a border surrounding the elements of the installation and visually reenforces its reference to the design of the Korean flag.

Attached to the frame are long lengths of fabric tied in a one loop bow recalling the Goreum, a ribbon that fastens the two parts Jeogori (top) and the Chima (skirt) of the Hanbok, the traditional Korean women's dress.

Attachment/Detachment

"It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity Which seems to me self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being 'elsewhere'."

-Salman Rushdie

The experience of migration has a way of "intensifying" memory because the act of remembering brings back the past. After spending some years in America and embracing everything that was American, I was becoming aware of loss of the past and realized that my "being elsewhere" should coexist with my past. I am a Korean-American, the hyphenated identity that is neither Korean nor American This experience of gain and loss provided a basis for Attachment/Detachment, an installation that combines dissolving projected texts, transparencies and sculptural objects.

In contrast to the earlier work that represented autobiographical narrative drawn from personal references of displacement in the context of immigration,Attachment/ Detachment explores symbolic space, both personal and public, as a metaphor for negotiating cultural differences of East and West What I may refer to as 'home' is not a concrete thing or place, but rather a psychological spacethat exists in between two countries, two languages, and two memories.  AsY i-Fu Tuan states, "Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other." I belong to a place that can provide a space beyond geographical and cultural boundaries.

The geometrical arrangement of two half-round tables in the center and four light boxes in each 'corner is inspired by the Korean flag and suggests a space that allows constant shifting, reconciliation and transformation The slide projection in the center silently repeats the various ways we define home' in English and Korean while quotes from The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard appear and disappear on the table surf ace in an attempt to evoke a dualistic balance between absence and presence, center and horizon, inside and outside.

-Young Kim

• Outside and inside are both intimate - they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility. If there exists a border-line surface between such an inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides

• Every object invested with intimate space becomes the center of all space. For each object, distance is the present, the horizon exists as much as the center

• A family's place of residence. One's place of residence The social unit formed by a family living together. Any place of residence or refuge A place of birth or origin. A congenial environment. One's own country. A familiar or usual setting. The place or region where something is native or most common. The place in which one's domestic affections are centered.

CEPA Journal Part 1 Uncommon Traits: Re/Locating Asia September 13 - October 31, 1997

“"Young Kim poignantly [sums] up the pull of two worlds which underlies every immigrant story," critic Shawn O'Sullivan wrote in the New York Daily News in 1997. Because the world is such a mobile place, and because the United States is a nation solely populated by immigrants no matter how early they set foot on North American soil, Kim's consistent theme of the notion of alienation is one that is highly accessible, one that transcends ethnicity and era. In fact, as dictionary definitions of "home" have evolved from "a family's place of residence" to "one's place of residence," such feelings of displacement can be felt on many levels, whenever a migration occurs, be it country to country, state to state, city to city, house to house.

“The experience of migration has a way of 'intensifying' memory because the act of remembering brings back the past," Kim wrote in the catalog for Uncommon Traits: Re/Locating Asia, which was on view at Buffalo's CEPA Gallery in 1997. "I am a Korean-American, the hyphenated identity that is neither Korean nor American." This complex sensation of losing a past self, gaining a new self, and being caught somewhere in a void in between the two, is expressed poetically in her installation Attachment/Detachment. The work brings together dissolving projected texts featuring quotes from Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard as well as definitions of "home" culled from lexicons old and new, transparencies depicting juxtaposed images of various places in both Korea and America, and sculptural objects-all arranged in a floor pattern based on the graphics found on the Korean flag. The "walls" of the installation space consist of hanging panels of fabric; the mobility of the "walls" as well as the constantly shifting text-projection convey an unsettling sense, while the structure of the installation, a homage to Kim's Korean background, remains as the foundation.”

-Reena Jana “The Displaced Self” Asian Art News, January February  2000