“My Grandmother is an OldMiss” (2015)

This was the first project I carried out in the United States. It centers around visualizing the various elements that exist in the cultural gaps I experienced while transitioning from East to West.

The term "Oldmiss" is broken English—a hybrid expression that might be uttered phonetically in Korean but holds no actual meaning in native English-speaking contexts. For example, the sentence “My grandmother is an Oldmiss” is inherently contradictory—both in Korean and English. In Korea, Oldmiss is colloquial slang for an older, unmarried woman, often with a negative connotation. However, referring to one’s grandmother as an Oldmiss is nonsensical, since being a grandmother implies marriage and family.

In English-speaking cultures, the word Oldmiss doesn’t exist at all, making the sentence even more meaningless or untranslatable. This title, therefore, is not a literal descriptor, but rather a linguistic pun that embodies the confusion, contradiction, and humor that can arise in the cultural in-between. It’s a wordplay born from the liminal space between two languages and two cultural systems.

For this project, I went to Garment Street on 33rd in New York City—known for high-end fashion materials—and used them to create absurd mascot-like costumes. I layered premium paint on luxury wood to craft furniture-like objects that also functioned as measuring devices—executed with an unnecessary degree of precision. These were not art practices driven by conventional goals or purposes. Instead, they were actions that questioned the values and assumptions of both cultures.

This period of work was about carving out a space that could only exist between the two worlds I inhabited. I was neither fully inside nor outside either culture, and this project was a way to assert and expand my identity in that ambiguous, often overlooked in-between space.