Hein Kuhn-Oh is a Korean, born-and-raised contemporary artist. After high school, he moved to the United States and studied art and photography in California and Ohio. Although he is not an adoptee artist like those mentioned in Kim’s “Producing Missing Persons,” there are enough similarities in his artistic interests to those described in Kim’s article to make a comparison.
Kim explains that due to the “lack of collective cultural forms, symbols, or images,” the subculture of adoptee artists have found a common interest in photography, abstraction of cultural Korean images, as well as concepts of performance rather than autobiographical finding, in their works. Maya Weimar’s “Seven Families” project includes photographs of the artist posing with tourists and attaching false narratives about her adopted family. Here, photographs which are often deemed as documentary and factual, disrupt the common stereotypes and narratives attached to Korean adoptees and their families. Similarly, Hein Kuhn-Oh is drawn to photography for its documentary, or rather posed documentary possibilities. In an artist profile, he calls photography a document, rather than a documentary form. His most famous works are various portraiture series such as ‘Ajumma’ (1999) and ‘Cosmetic Girls’ (2009) in which he photographs personalities and stereotypes for their external appearances to highlight prejudices in Korean society. Neither Maya Weimar nor Hein Kuhn-Oh are interested in truly identifying the person who is subject to their work, but rather highlighting meaning and reactions to personhood. Both artists have photographed Asian and Caucasian bodies, and both artists travel internationally for work and exhibitions, yet their motivations are inherently different. In “Missing Persons,” Kim explains that adoptee artists will always have a strong sense of activism, in ways that non-adoptee artists won’t, but kate hers is against the notion that adoptee art can only ever be adoptee art. So how do we consider adoptee artists in comparison to Korean born-and-raised artists like Hein Kuhn-Oh? No matter how similar the work, the history of diaspora attached to adoptee artists will continually be attached to the art they produce. No matter how abstract or conceptual, will adoptee artists only ever be exhibited in adoptee artist exhibitions? What if Maya Weimar and kate hers create works not related to dislocation or their adoptee identity, will their work still be conceived as adoptee art? As I mentioned before, based on their success and careers, artists like Hein Kuhn-Oh and Maya Weimar get to travel and exhibit internationally, they studied art in the United States, they photograph the same bodies, and question collective personhood and responses to physical appearances in their work- so where or what is the line that separates them?
http://www.heinkuhnoh.com/index.html?d1=01&d2=04&d3=&lang=eng
The Politics of K-Pop 
I really like your blog post, Carla! I think bringing in Hein Kuhn-Oh as a means to investigate what it means to be a Korean artist, adopted or not, and examining the similarities in their art’s subject material and execution. Ultimately, I agree that these similarities further prove RHEE’s statement and assertion that her identity as a Korean adoptee does not define or constrain her artistic abilities. I think that this presents a larger interesting issue about identification with artists. As an art history minor, the majority of the people NYU has us study are white. But they’re never called “white artists” by academics, just like RHEE points out those who adopt children are never identified as or called “adopters” outside of adoption communities. Only when one’s race or ethnicity when it is non-white or non-hegemonic is it tacked onto the beginning of the term “artist” – ex. “Black artist,” “Korean artist,” “female artist,” or “adoptee artist” (same with comedian, politician, etc). Not to say that their identities do not contribute to, inform, or are important in their work, but when one like RHEE attempts to disidentify with her forced identity, it presents an interesting issue.
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Great post Carla! I like your references to other artists, I’ll be sure to check out their work.
As a Korean-American adoptee, I often feel connected to other adoptees like Maya Weimar and kate-hers RHEE in their struggles with identity. In my experience, I feel that people often place imagined expectations on what I am “supposed to be” to them, according to what they know about transnational/transracial adoption and/or Korean people. Growing up in a suburban area in New Jersey which was mostly white/Korean, I often felt in between both groups. As I had no means of connecting to Korean culture within my own family, I felt “too white” for my Korean friends, and “too Korean/Asian” for my white friends.
To answer your questions, “So how do we consider adoptee artists in comparison to Korean born-and-raised artists like Hein Kuhn-Oh? No matter how similar the work, the history of diaspora attached to adoptee artists will continually be attached to the art they produce. What if Maya Weimar and kate hers create works not related to dislocation or their adoptee identity, will their work still be conceived as adoptee art?” I believe the work should only be interpreted by the audience according to the artist’s intentions. Just like any other type of art, if the artist labels it as a comment on the experience of adoption, then it should be considered as such; people should not automatically assume that all of their art is related to their background as an adoptee, because it doesn’t have to be.
As for the question of “No matter how abstract or conceptual, will adoptee artists only ever be exhibited in adoptee artist exhibitions?” I certainly hope that this is not the case. I believe that anyone should be able to have their work displayed to a wide audience in order to get everyone thinking about their art. In fact, I think that if an adoptee artist had a work related to their experience, it could be especially beneficial for that work to be shared outside of adoptee-specific spaces. Oftentimes, when the topic of my adoption is brought up in conversation with strangers, they are very hesitant to ask any questions as they “don’t want their question to come off as offensive.” Additionally, they assume that my story of adoption follows the stereotypically imagined savior narrative of adoptees and they treat my experience as some sort of inspirational takeaway, when it’s really just my life experience. Therefore, I would hope that the spreading of adoptees’ art could facilitate more general discussion of adoption, in order to break down the stereotypes that people apply to adoptees.
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The question around identity politics in the art world is an interesting one. In looking at how Hein Kuhn-Oh’s work and the works of adoptee artist, a fascinating complication emerges, as you discuss in your article. I see the activist conversations that artists like Hein Kuhn-Oh, Kate-hers Rhee and Maya Weimar provoke as falling under the same general umbrella of countering traditional narratives around personhood/identity, diaspora, and transnationalism. However, where these artists all differ is their source material. For Kate-hers, she has a very direct linkage to adoptee experiences transnationally, being an adoptee herself mixing with Korean, American, and German cultures. While Hein Kuhn-Oh and Maya Weimar also question discourses of collective personhood and the physical body, the art they create also has a space. Both artists’ fame is not an affront to Kate-Hers, but in fact amplifies the conversation and keeps it going. This benefits the work of Kate-Hers through alliances and support networks, when artists work in good faith and not out of competition. The line that separates these two types of artists you discuss is faint, yet visible. In conclusion, the question here is not the idea of adoptee art or adoptee artists, but the conversations around transnational personhood, as demonstrated by adoptee experiences, or otherwise.
– Stephanie Yang
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This blog post was was very good and posed really great questions about Korean art! I think using Kuhn-Oh’s article in conversation with Kate-Hers was a great way to show how authors can view very similar topics differently. To try to analyze the question “how do we consider adoptee artists in comparison to Korean born-and-raised artists like Hein Kuhn-Oh,” I think it is possible to make effective activism artwork about adoptee subculture when you yourself are not an adoptee, but I believe that coming from an actual background of being an adopted Korean -American child comes with more knowledge of what it is actually like. Having that additional knowledge and emotion about artwork could possibly make the artwork more impactful on the viewers and convey a stronger message than an artist who does not perhaps have the same emotional connection about the adoptee subculture community.
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