From Elsewhere, Within here:  

“Tell me, and let me tell my hearers what I have heard from you who heard it from your mother, and your grandmother so that what is said may be guarded and unfailingly transmitted to the women of tomorrow.”   

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- Trinh T. Minh Ha, 'Woman, Native, and Other', Grandma’s Story 

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Sunday Kitchen's first exhibition opens with 'Elsewhere, Within Here: Women of Tomorrow' featuring artist Bella Yongok Kim. 

 

Bella Kim' interest in the environment is manifested in her attention to discarded and vulnerable materials. She traverses a diverse range of media sourced from her family home, and recycled food packaging collected from her neighborhood, reflecting her keen interest and care for the everyday and the environment.   

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The exhibition also focuses on the eco-feminist approach that permeates her work in concept and materials.  The labor of care embedded in the washing, and the weaving of recycled materials, fabrics, and wrappings is rooted in her childhood memory of making Bojagi, a Korean household textile.  Bojagi has a long, hidden lineage of nameless female artisans, including her grandmother and mother, that has been passed down to her as a diasporic artist, woman, and mother.

 

The exhibit’s theme draws from Trinh T. Min Ha’s seminal work "Woman, Native, and Other," a chapter that centers on grandmothers and mothers, who remain among the art world's most invisible subjects.  In the chapter "Grandma's Story," mothers and grandmothers appear as storytellers who have been listening, speaking, and transmitting their stories, and the act of storytelling for centuries.

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The work on the window display, “Pairing Up and Down” for example, a pair of shoes hung and suspended in mid-air, takes its form from the "flower shoes," often representing a bridal shoe in Korean tradition, as she embarks on a new journey. The name “Up and Down” and the suspended step encapsulate her diasporic experience of moving into the unknown, embodying migration, vulnerability, and displacement with intimacy and care, one step at a time.  Across installations and textile work, the exhibit threads together the diasporic experience seen from a place of belonging that weaves the experience of the Other;  the uprooted and migrated, and cultural hybridity that unravels singularised identity.  

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The sense of futurity found throughout her work is perhaps more quotidian, but also more radical - in 'staying with the trouble' in the backdrop of ecological collapse, against the dystopian future portrayed in the media and escapist futurism.  Bella’s personal and socially conscious work invites viewers to reflect on the relationship with ecology in the everyday, and to consider our interconnectedness, and ways to weave a more sustainable future.

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