What you believe is where you are
What you believe is where you are
This three-channel video installation begins in Koreatown, LA — where the artist born and raised in Korea, encountered the layered languages of a diaspora neighborhood: aging signage mixing first-generation immigrants' Korean with broken English, and a newer generation's broken Korean with new English.
The spatialization of these languages — or beliefs — became the space itself. What we believe, shaped by language, its struggles to survive, its clumsy adaptations, accumulates into a neighborhood, a world.
A Language Model for Colonized Tongues
This work is a playful act of revenge — made less than a year after the artist arrived in the United States, still carrying the weight of her own colonized tongue. Visitors are invited to speak directly into a microphone, reading Korean signage collected from Koreatown storefronts: 심마니 (ginseng digger), 절단 코다리 (cut frozen pollack) — strange, hyper-specific, deeply ordinary words.
A custom speech-to-text model, trained with a low accuracy threshold, responds generously even to approximate pronunciations.
Audience Experience: What Am I Saying?
The installation demands individual effort. It makes you doubt your own speech. Through hesitation and mispronunciation, visitors activate a large-scale video space with their tongues — and find, at the far end of that uncertainty, the tongue-made world.
What you believe is where you are
What they believe is where you are
What you believe is what you saw
What they believe is what they saw
Where you are is what you believe
Where you are is what they believed
What you saw is what they believe
What they saw is what you believed
What you say is what you saw
What you say is what you believe
What you say is where you are
What you believe is where you are
Collaborators
Co-Producer & Cinematographer : Wenzhuo WangCinematographer : Jace Casey
Dancer : Anne Kim
Choreographer : Brian Golden
Costume Designer : Odessa Newman
Makeup Artist : Lily Rutledge
