‘Wu Tsang, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst’, frieze d/e
This early review, written while I was still an undergraduate, marked a turning point in how I understood the potential of criticism. Ostensibly a conventional exhibition text, it opened a space where my longstanding preoccupations first cohered: the limits of language, the politics of voice, and how forms like silence, gesture, or citation might speak where speech cannot. Encountering Tsang’s film provided a framework for thinking about voice as relational, affective, and resistant to capture — a thread I continue to follow in my writing today.
‘Desert Forever / Resurrection of Desire’, PUBLIC, click HERE for PDF
This long-form essay was commissioned by PUBLIC as a speculative response to actress Aomi Muyock’s appearance on billboards across the California desert. Without access to the imagery, I worked from Muyock’s words and my own archive of cinematic, philosophical, and geographic references. The result is a hybrid text that weaves cultural history with fictional framing, moving between interview, myth, and film theory.
More than a thematic inquiry, this piece marked a turning point in my craft. It was the first time I treated writing not simply as interpretation, but as structure — as pacing, address, and a formal proposition. I was also beginning to articulate a different mode of representing the female subject: not as a surface to decode, but as a presence to hold in tension.
‘Annals of Grief’, click HERE for PDF
Written during and after my father’s time in palliative care, Annals of Grief emerged from the conditions of the pandemic and from a need to write through emotional and temporal disorientation. Influenced by Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling (2012), the text experiments with memoir as critical method — working across registers of thought and feeling without subordinating one to the other.
This was the first time I consciously shaped a creative form around the rhythm of grief itself, resisting linear narrative in favour of affective structure. In doing so, I began to understand how my own writing is informed by diasporic inheritance — how Swiss-Korean memory and displacement inscribe themselves into language, pacing, and voice. Annals marked a shift: from writing as analysis to writing as a means of making meaning across languages, histories, and embodied experience.
‘Grief for the masses: R.I.P. Germain’, Tank magazine
This essay developed directly out of Annals of Grief, extending its critical-personal mode into a more public-facing form. Commissioned by Tank magazine, the piece responds to the work of artist RIP Germain, whose installations trace Black grief and collective mourning through sound, space, and citation.
Germain’s practice offered a framework for understanding grief as cultural and inherited. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s writing on affect, I shaped the piece to carry its own emotional and conceptual ambivalence — using association and theoretical texture rather than explanatory tone.
This was also a moment when I began to think of form as expressive of tension: between visibility and loss, ritual and representation, personal memory and critical distance. Writing here became not just a response to the artwork, but a space in which grief could be registered structurally — in rhythm, in syntax, and in what resists being said.
‘Between Delivery: Letter Threads After the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Archive’ (Part I), CUNY Center for the Humanities
This letter-based project, published by the Center for the Humanities at CUNY, is a collaboration with artist Cici Wu and researcher July Ban. Framed around our shared interest in the Korean diaspora — and in particular the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha — the correspondence unfolds across distance, language, and time, experimenting with the relational form of the letter as both method and structure.
The project draws together many of the concerns that have shaped my recent work: the limits of language, the interdependence of memory and place, and the porous line between critical reflection and personal history. But rather than offering closure, this collaboration marks a threshold. It signals the beginning of a larger writing project — a book-in-progress that extends these questions into a sustained inquiry on diasporic aesthetics, experimental form, and embodied history.