I was seven or eight. I went young a lot when I was a kid.
Oh, that’s right. With your brother Larry, I remember that from your book.

Yeah. [Laughs]
Larry is such an American name, by the way.

It’s also such a boomer name. Like, have you ever met anyone under the age of 40 with a name like Larry? It’s wild.
No. [Laughs] Well, so 34 and it’s because I have a huge family. All my grandparents, everybody had moved to America. So I have almost, I don’t know, like 50 first cousins. Oh my gosh, everybody’s in America. Like, there’s nobody left in Korea.

Oh, yeah. Most of my cousins are still there. So that’s why we were there so much.
It’s nice. I mean, you have a little bit more connection back to Korea. I feel like I don’t. Mine has been severed from Korea. So yeah, Gyopo, let me show you the sign. I just learned the sign myself because I had asked a Korean friend of mine. This sign right here is Korean, it’s different from American Sign. But this sign right here is “red.” And then this sign right here is to show “in your blood, your veins.” So this gyopo sign is like red veins, red blood, in my blood. I think it’s a very powerful sign. It’s all about your blood, your heritage. The reason why I made that art is that, with the long tiger tail, I feel like it resembles this ongoing journey that we have. My grandmother left North Korea, that’s the beginning of this journey. And then she moved to South Korea. Our family then moved to America. I moved to New York, then further moved to Berlin. I hope to make it back to LA. But this journey is like a long winding trail, a tiger’s tail. And so as I look at and think about gyopo, you know, I asked all four of the women in my family, my grandmother, my mother, my daughter, and me, and I felt like this. The women in my family really needed to be represented. I come from a long line of women, and I’m continuing this long natural lineage by having my own daughter. And so after giving birth to my daughter, I understood my place in this long history as a woman. And so when I was pregnant, I had this very common line on my belly, but it felt like this line led all the way back to my history, my heritage. So, gyopo to me is like this continuous journey of the diaspora. But it always comes back to our heritage and now with my daughter Roux, I wonder about what her journey is going to look like and what her heritage looks like. What does gyopo mean to you?

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