We live in a world that is both solid and liquid, ever-flowing and persistently elusive, the idea of ‘home’ drifts between memory and matter. It is a structure we inhabit and a feeling we chase; a place made not only of walls and roofs but of language, gestures, fragments of past lives, and imagined futures. Patchwork of Elsewhere is tracing these intangible architectures—those built from displacement, longing, and provisional belonging. Home and family as the notion of both architectural and psychological spaces, the exhibition is situating them within the ever-shifting conditions of migration, displacement, memory, and cultural hybridity.
With the work of four artists, the exhibition brings together a constellation of practices that materialize the condition of being ‘elsewhere’—a state characterized not by rootedness but by constant negotiation, fragmentation, and reconstruction. Each artist, shaped by their own distinct cultural backgrounds and personal narratives, engages and shares the poetics of in-betweenness with what it means to exist as an ‘elsewhere’ to carry a sense of unrootedness that is both challenging and generative.
Gina Bae’s paintings weave traditional Korean folk motifs with speculative, figurative landscapes, creating visual spaces where the stories of two generations—herself and the first-generation immigrant parents—overlap as both familiar and unfamiliar snapshots. The experimentation on the Korean Minhwa art style with the experience of growing up in America as a second-generation Korean American girl allows Bae to claim the cultural heritage. Timothy Hyunsoo Lee deconstructs bodily and emotional terrains, visualizing the dissonant path of immigration and queer embodiment, exploring the rituals, anxieties, and material memories of navigating between cultures, while seeking a home within a politicized and ever-shifting body. Sookkyung Park presents delicate paper sculptures inspired by the overlapping eaves of traditional Korean Hanok architecture, reinterpreting the design as well as the tactile memory of Hanji, Korean paper, as a means to revisit personal histories of home, memory, and migration. Through meditative acts of folding and layering, she transforms paper into vessels of remembrance, connecting past and present across geographies. Yu-Ching Wang conducts documentary research into the urban presence of migrant communities, offering poetic yet grounded reflections on how people claim space and visibility in unfamiliar cities.
Patchwork of Elsewhere intentionally gathers these disparate practices to form a collective assemblage of fragments. Rather than seeking harmony or resolution, the exhibition embraces dissonance, presenting difference and incompleteness as productive and attempts to reframe the absence of a singular, stable notion of ‘home’. It is not a loss but an opportunity which new ways to belong, even if temporarily, might occur. By inhabiting the interstices between memory and place, body and image, tradition and speculation, these works collectively weave a poetics of provisional belonging. It creates a fluid, ephemeral landscape, where each of us might encounter echoes of our own untold stories and unresolved feelings, among the fragments of others.
We invite all those who have ever felt at home, or adrift, or somewhere in between, to step into this space, one that prioritizes fluidity over permanence, connection over ownership, and placemaking over rootedness.
Written by Jerim Kim
Exhibited at the Korean Cultural Center Washington, D.C., 3 July to 22 August 2025
Curated by Jerim Kim with participating artists: Gina Bae, Timothy Hyunsoo Lee, Sookkyung Park, and Yu-Ching Wang.