Images by Sara Pooley
Rooted in both personal and collective grief within the Korean diaspora, Au’s Meet Me At No Gun Ri (Unbridgeable Gulf) reflects on the often-overlooked No Gun Ri massacre. This 1950 U.S.-led attack took the lives of hundreds of Korean civilians, and its memory continues to echo through generations. As an adopted Korean person, Au weaves together personal history, ancestral ritual, and broader trauma to create a deeply layered installation.
The piece draws inspiration from the 초분 (𝒄𝒉𝒐𝒃𝒖𝒏), a traditional Korean temporary burial site made from straw and used for those who passed away far from home. At its center is a braided spine that would traditionally be made from straw, but here it’s recreated using synthetic hair. This material choice evokes the physical body while also speaking to themes of identity, loss, and displacement. The work is also infused with the scent of “𝒄𝒐𝒔𝒕𝒖𝒔”, which carries notes of skin, oil, and hair, adding a visceral and intimate sensory layer. The silk tapestries hung on both ends of the 초분 (𝒄𝒉𝒐𝒃𝒖𝒏), represent a liminal portal/ space that transcends the physical world, transporting people to different temporal realms that exist together simultaneously.
Through these elements, Au offers a space for reflection, remembrance, and the possibility of imagined reunion, where the weight of history and grief might be acknowledged, reentered, and transformed.
-Text by Sherry Chen
Meet Me At No Gun Ri (Unbridgeable Gulf), 2025 mixed media installation: Habatoi silk, duck grass, synthetic hair, rocks, twine, glass beads, scented elements
ABCC11 and the Absence of You addresses corporeal hauntings that link deep lineages, despite isolation, and can survive systematic efforts towards the violence of assimilation. Au questions the nature of connection, belonging, and survival- and perhaps most significantly, preservation. Their relationship to self defies the flattening of DNA as well as the colonial fantasy project known as the industrial adoption complex, rendering a world and existence built with their own ability to transcend space and time.
This piece is titled in reference to the gene, which has been studied and found absent in the majority of Korean people, and is responsible for producing a strong body odor. Bodily scents such as breast milk and pheromones have been shown to help both mother and child bond and identify each other postpartum.
Au was separated from their birth mother as a five-month-old infant. This work explores avenues of grief that are afforded to people who have been affected by adoption, family separation, and cultural and ancestral displacement. Au’s materiality interrogates what is lost beyond the legibility within the tangible world between mother and child, and the inherent tensions that arise amidst a child growing up thousands of miles away from their country of birth and culture.
ABCC11 and the Absence of You , 2024 mixed media sculpture: resin, digital collage, paper, human hair, rocks, mirror, scented elements
A Clearing is a multi-sensory installation presented as an offering of transportive possibility to those affected by the brutality of the carceral system. A re-imagination of a liminal space; a gateway allowing those on the inside visibility, resistance and ultimately consolation.
Referencing the artwork used as a photographic backdrop found in the visiting area of prisons, the textile component employs a nature motif on silk (landscapes are a popular subject matter in these backdrops) and abstracts it, bending into an infinite lush space, teeming with possibility. Rendered as a portal to another realm; brilliant hues of saturation jade, beryl, emerald and moss are dedicated to connecting the viewer back into the natural world. It is positioned as a respite and in contrast to the harm caused by the prison system and a place for regeneration, growth and care. With consideration to materiality, there is no longer a question who is deserving of consideration and dignity but how?
The scent element offers a way into a fully expressive, resonant world. The intangibility of memory and ephemeral qualities are expressed through this olfactive detail which references wet earth; an omnipresent smell offering a prospect of anew. Restoration comes as an opportunity to become embodied by fully engaging the senses withstanding the oppressive nature of incarceration.
Seemingly benign physical objects contextualize the space: a visiting table where loved ones attempt to bridge worlds with each other. Dual mirrors offer a break in consciousness, no longer functioning solely as an invasive surveillance device, but reflecting possible versions of ourselves; multiple lives that are not solely defined by a single act and actively defy the system’s intention to impose these limitations.
A Clearing, 2021 mixed media installation: Habatoi silk, floor materials, mirror, scented materials
Images by Sara Pooley
Inexhaustible Abundance is an installation conceived as an offering to all of the young children who did not have agency in their leaving of Korea- for the children who were raised worlds away from their homeland and birth culture. And most pertinently, to confront Korea and US imperialist forces actions rooted in violence which resulted in the commodification of their bodies and created a global industrial adoption complex. This system displaced a faction of multi-generations and secured the country’s status as a global economic power decades after the war was over.
After conducting research on the symbolism of flora in Korea, she found the national flower, hibiscus, represented infinity. Further translation of this notion was documented as “inexhaustible abundance,” words that were deeply disturbing to Au when contextualizing them within Korea’s history of sending so many children away, akin to the selling of the country’s natural resources.
Au employs a traditional decorative Korean wrapping, 보자기 (bojagi) to make reference of the notion that adoptees are a “gift” and easily transportable to their new families abroad. The scent element deployed by a ceramic diffuser was composed with the idea of the inherent tension in a fragrance; the objectivity of smelling and categorizing beyond binaries. Furthermore, challenging the positive, reductive / fairytale narrative of adoption that societies have come to as the only acceptable outcome.
What are the primal manifestations of fear, grief and trauma and how do they appear through response in our bodies? It is this haunting en masse that bears the responsibility of interrogating an unchecked system without the resolution of a clear pathway forward.
Inexhaustible Abundance, 2022 mixed media installation: silk, mirror, rope, porcelain diffuser, scented elements