Jeewon Han is an artist and painter based in Chicago, IL. Born in Seoul, Korea and immigrating to the US, her work builds on the continuum of cultures shaping identity.

My artistic practice builds on the continuum of cultures shaping identity. Diasporic memory is central to my art, as my dreamscapes represent the conflicts of assimilation and preservation of Asian and Western traditions. Born in South Korea, then immigrating to the US at five years old, my work illustrates the complexity caused by the displacement in the psyche of people who migrate from their homeland. 

My work explores the dialect between memory, loss and longing in diasporic consciousness. Western depictions of the East shapes a binary view of the world with often exotic, fetishized tropes. With my own struggles as a Korean immigrant for an identity that becomes ambiguous in the West, symbols are an important anchor in my practice to inscribe cultural memory in creation of a new identity.

I enjoy the uncanny, distorting recognizable objects into vivid realms to give my objects and figures their own narrative and agency throughout my work. My imagery aims to reclaim and subvert Westernized views of the East.