mom and i (2023)The work is a collage of oil painting and AI-fabricated images. This piece is a study of familial relationships, lost histories, cultural memory, and maternal connection, through the fabrication of those things with technology, artificial intelligence, and the internet.I found it interesting that the AI, when fed things like my familial names, and words like “mother”, “daughter”, “woman” , or “man”, would return such fascinating images. Among flowers, images of women, morphed bodies, and faces, three things especially stood out.First, the images often seemed to attempt at imitating the Korean geographic landscape, and second, traditional patterns or fabrics. But thirdly, these images just as often included images that imitated war, or military, without any mention of the words. In line in significance, and shown adjacent with physical geography and traditional fabric was militarization in this cultural consciousness. Translated on to the bodies of women who are nearly ghosts, a mother and daughter, into their skin, hair and body, and to the landscape around them, these images or memories travel generation, time, distance, and come to exist in Asian America. Hushed, silenced, or simply unknown, they can’t help but make up the fabric of our beings.