Mother Tongue

This project explores belonging and expresses the complexities of my life experience through photography.

“Where are you from?” - whenever I am asked this question, I struggle with the answer because growing up with a multicultural background made me feel I did not belong to any one place.

The first time I became aware of my nationality was when I was in the fourth grade and transferred to a Korean school in Tokyo. I could not even write my name in Korean because I went to a Japanese Public School, and my parents told me, "We made you move to this school because we want you to learn our native language.” I have experienced a sense of in-betweenness and struggled to reconcile my multiple identities and find my belonging. This feeling has become even stronger since I immigrated to the United States. 

Mother Tongue is a body of work about my experience of growing up as Korean in Japan and as an immigrant in the U.S. I capture the emotions such as confusion and melancholy I have felt through living within multiple cultures in both direct and nuanced ways in a poetic manner using the medium of photography.