I did use a lot of family and autobiographical materials in my work. It has been an ongoing process. I think probably the first instance of it was some of the work that is actually in the show, some of the earlier works dating from the early eighties, m id-eighties. I was doing these drawings when, for the first time, I realized that I had a rich source of imagery in a lot of the old photos I somehow ended up with. Nobody else seemed to be interested in these family photos. Every time I would go back home to visit I would see them and get very interested in just looking at the images, because I knew somehow it was as if just by looking at these photos, I could try to figure out a little bit more about the connections with this past history that I felt so far removed from.

The first groups of images that I worked with were actually of my mother when she was working at the U.S. army base in Korea during the time that we were living in Korea from 1953, the end of the Korean War, to 1960, when we left Korea when I was seven ye ars old. During that seven year period my mother was the sole supporter of the family. We relied heavily on her job at the army base. It was just a basic job as a coffee girl in the part of the army base that dealt with supplies and so on. It was hard work for her she left early in the morning on a bus because it was on the outskirts of town and came back pretty late at night. I remember that period of my life. I hardly saw my mom. I knew that she was making a lot of sacrifices to keep us going. T he photographs that she had from that time are really compelling and fascinating. They show her interacting with U.S. soldiers I was trying to conjure up stories about what was going on. At that time, Korea was recovering from a devastating war and it s eemed so exotic to me that she was working with Americans. They were always the rich people in my mind and as a result of her working there we would get some American products like Ritz Crackers, which I thought was just so wonderful. It was the biggest treat and a lot of these products could be found at that time only in the black market. American products were so expensive and so prized for a lot of Koreans who did not have anything. Every Christmas time she would give us some gifts that the GIs had given her to give to us, toys that we never had growing up. From that experience I had this notion of the American dream that a lot of foreigners have when they come from a deprived situation, where they think America is the land of plenty, where all yo ur dreams come true. In 1960, when we could finally go to the United States, my mother was very sad to leave the family behind. She looked upon it with lots of trepidation and sadness, but for me it was an adventure. As an adult you look back on that t ime with some analysis and more of an understanding of what was going on. When I started working on these drawings, for instance, the early drawings, I did not really know much about Korea itself. But having gone to school at Berkeley and through a lot of the anti-war demonstrations, at least I had more of an understanding of the role the U.S. had in the Third World and in relation to other countries. And, certainly the civil rights movement was a major historical moment of influence for me. So, Ba ck of the Bus, 1953 was an attempt to represent the relationship of this image of my mother sitting in the back of the bus in Korea with the interaction of Koreans and the GI soldiers that were sitting in the bus in 1953. I situated it in Korea at th e end of the war, about a decade before the civil rights movement and the whole issue of blacks having to sit in the back of the bus, and represented the fact that discrimination or racism is something that is very related to imperialism.

deColonization, 1991 as with a lot of installations, I am very much responding to the site. The subject of the work was to talk about socio-political aspects of Korean female subjectivity. I was intrigued by this packet I received from the United Nations having declared 1990 the "Decade of De-colonization." It offered a very political, precise definition of "colonization," and I thought that was a very limited way of considering "colonization." If you look in a broader sense at the political si tuation of the world, there are so many places that have gained so-called "independence" and yet are still colonized in many ways. That is the way I regard Korea. Korea has a very complex relationship with the United States that most people don't realiz e. For instance, when the Korean War ended, a peace treaty was never signed. The U.S. still has supreme command of the South Korean forces. With this piece I wanted to focus on Korean women and how they fit into this complicated relationship. I relied on stories of my mother and other female members of the family and created a new text, which was in some ways an amalgamation of their stories, to talk about Korean women in general and their relationship in this sort of social, cultural, political conte xt. The specific components in this show are the dress and four panels. The dress itself is a traditional Korean dress. It is not something that most Koreans would wear now unless they live in the rural parts or it is a special holiday occasion. I cho se to use a traditional Korean dress as a symbol that would very immediately identify a Korean female, not so much because it is traditional but because it has strong identification with the Korean female. The top of the dress is actually from my mother' s dress which I carried around with me. The bottom skirt is elongated, and painted on the front and the back with fabric dye is a translation in English and in Korean of a poem that I found by a Korean American poet named Won Ko called "Home." This poem is about home and belonging in relationship to history. It says that "One's sense of belonging or identity is not located in a place of birth or wherever you might find yourself, but more in coming to terms with one's history." To me that was the basis for my push to this work. It was kind of a historical understanding that was very important for me in making sense of my identity here in the U.S. and understanding Korean American women, Third World women, and the many different kinds of identities I c ould talk about.

Yong Soon Min immigrated to this country in 1960 at the age of seven from South Korea. She is Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Irvine, and a recipient of a Visual Artists Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Ranging in media fr om photography to installations, her work has been exhibited in the U.S. and abroad, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art/New York City, Camerawork Gallery/London, Kumho Museum/Seoul, Fourth Baguio Art Festival/Philippines, Museum Folkwang/Germany, and in two Havana Biennials/Cuba.