Harold Washington Library Center hosts a 2018 Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month art exhibit on the 3rd floor during the month of May featuring artist Sumie Song.
The only daughter of Korean-born parents, Sumie Song grew up between cultures, between languages. As a young adult, she watched her share of Korean telenovelas or “K-dramas.” The storylines were unrelatable, even ridiculous, but the faces of mother and daughter, heroine, best-friend, arch-nemesis were versions of her own, a stabilizing influence on her conflicted notions of beauty and being. All that changed about 20 years ago, when the face of the Korean drama itself began to change, appearing over time less and less Korean. One out of five women in Seoul has undergone some form of plastic surgery (Marx, Patricia. “About Face,” New York Times, March 23, 2015). For critics who liken the phenomenon to racial reassignment, the attempt to e-race or eradicate racial markers is the sign of a collective psyche “twice-colonized,” first by Japan, then the west. The images in this series were inspired by ads for plastic surgery in the Seoul Metro and on the internet.
