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In 2016, I was asked by Christine Macel to show a large scale work at the 57th Venice Biennale Arte, 2017. I worked on the film, Love before Bond, drawings, and architectural sculptures, which questioned the ethics behind aesthetics in relation to race and migration.

The film, Love before Bond, stemmed from my interest in my millennial niece’s adolescent angst. As a Korean-American female, my niece tries to find herself in an existing narrative of the marginalized. This, presently in the USA, is the narrative of people of color, which, for a teenager, is as alien as anything else—so it is for a young man of color.

The columns in the installation are a rendition of the Pleasure Pavilion (1964) by Philip Johnson, whose aesthetic path offsets that of Baldwin’s even though they both lived in New York City in synchronicity at the height of the American Civil Rights Movement. In short, the piece is a fairy tale about people who have never met.

This work was funded by two separate grants in 2016 and 2017 from the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation. The piece was collected afterwards by Maeil Dairies, Korea.