Christina Yuna Ko

Bio: Christina Yuna Ko is a Queens-based artist and member of the collective Asian Feminist Studio for Art Research (AFSAR). Her work reclaims the visual language living in the Asian diasporic experience as a means of imagining and speculation. Selected exhibitions include: “39 Footnotes”, Accent Sisters, New York, NY; “Gathering”, Five Myles, Brooklyn, NY; “Late Night Enterprise”, Perrotin, New York, NY; and “Bathing in Public”, Selenas Mountain, Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been featured in Artforum, FAR–NEAR, Hyperallergic, and The Washington Post among others. She has further participated in programs at the Palais de Tokyo and GYOPO (LA), among others.

christinayunako.com
instagram @christina_yuna_ko

a-fsar.com
instagram @afsar_asianfeministstudio

Artist Statement: New Jeans begins their song “Hurt” yearning for a message from someone they care for. When you are diasporic, distance and time amplify such sentiments as absence becomes a condition of everyday life. My work attempts to demarcate an aesthetic lexicon from the Korean diasporic experience of home and the geographic, temporal, and sociocultural collisions that fill the gaps left by displacement. By activating familial histories, media platforms, and Asian enclaves as sites of reference, I uncover visual connections across the migrant Asian diaspora. My lexicon thus becomes an amalgam of “cute culture,” imported cultural artifacts, generational practices, and domestic wares.

I am interested in the dualities of the home: accumulation and emptiness as both presence and absence, ghosts and spirits alongside the living, and shared yet deeply personal experiences. Through recontextualizing and remaking found objects and images as installations, I unearth invisible interconnections spanning the personal to geopolitical within the domestic site. Cuteness as an aesthetic proliferates through the daily life of the diaspora and in the work becomes a shared intimate visual glossary. Ultimately, I aim to reclaim the living language of the diasporic experience as a site of imagining and to speculate on what can be learned from the richness present in persistent everyday practices.

Christina Yuna Ko

She left nothing but the scent of flowers..., 2024
Acrylic on wood panel and floor mat, drying rack, towels, washcloth, sponges, clips, massagers, artificial foliage, key chains, rubber leaves, fan, surge protector, inkjet prints on vellum, and air freshener
67" x 58" x 80"
Courtesy of the artist