My teaching begins where my studio practice begins, at the meeting point of different worlds. Moving between Korean and Western artistic traditions has taught me that some of the most transformative knowledge emerges where differences meet and press against one another. In these spaces, materials speak, histories surface, and intuition becomes a form of intelligence. This is the atmosphere I cultivate in the classroom. I teach color, design, drawing, and painting not as isolated skills, but as practices of attention to form, context, and the forces that shape how and why we make.

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Craft and wonder are inseparable in my teaching. I take the fundamentals seriously. How a shift in hue can change the emotional temperature of a painting. How the weight of a line can stabilize or unsettle a composition. How rhythm gives a work its breath. These structures provide students with stability and confidence. From there, I encourage them to question, dismantle, and reimagine. Technique is not the destination. It is the threshold that allows risk, curiosity, and discovery to take place.

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My approach to critique is deeply informed by the pedagogy of feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks, whose work I deeply respect. She describes education as a practice of freedom, grounded in participation, vulnerability, and presence. From her, I learned that critique is not an act of judgment, but a shared practice of attention. In my classroom, critique becomes a collective practice of looking with care and precision. We speak to what the work reveals, what it resists, and the questions it opens. Students learn that critique is not about pleasing the room, but about clarifying intention and sharpening vision.

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I structure my classes to reflect hooks’s emphasis on engaged pedagogy. Students are invited to speak, listen, and respond as active participants in the learning process. The classroom becomes a space of mutual recognition, where knowledge is not delivered from above but shaped through dialogue and shared responsibility. Art making is understood as inquiry rather than performance.

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Mentorship is central to my teaching. I support students in developing resilience and artistic clarity that extends beyond a single semester. Sometimes this means addressing a formal challenge. Other times it means helping students name the deeper questions their work is circling. In the spirit of hooks’s radical care, I emphasize that uncertainty is not failure but an essential part of learning. Alongside conceptual and material growth, I prepare students for professional practice by guiding them in documentation, writing, and speaking clearly about their work.

 

My studio practice mirrors my pedagogy. I work between Eastern philosophies of repetition, care, and embodied process, and Western traditions of experimentation and conceptual rigor. Holding these histories in dialogue allows students to see art as a living practice shaped by culture, memory, and evolving questions. They learn that they are not simply inheriting a lineage, but actively reshaping it.

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At its core, my teaching is guided by a simple conviction. Art is a way of meeting the world with imagination and care. I want students to leave my courses with strong technical skills, but also with a deeper understanding of why they make, what they are reaching toward, and how their work can hold complexity, empathy, and wonder. For me, teaching and making remain inseparable, parallel practices of listening, risk taking, and giving form to what matters most.