Jesse Chun
On Paper
A Word from the Artist (Click to view)
My work investigates notions of homeland in an increasingly mobile world. Drawing from my own transcultural experience as an immigrant in multiple countries, I examine bureaucratic documents that are used to validate our identities between borders.
In my work, I transform various passports’ watermarked backgrounds into large-scale landscapes by employing methods of appropriation, scanning, and digital manipulation. I re-frame and erase details of the images so that they are devoid of their bureaucratic function, national symbols and cultural specificity. What remains are landscapes of boundless nature. In this gesture, the landscapes become metaphors for our collective identity and transit. My landscapes reveal the ideology, interrogation, displacement and dreams that become a part of who we are.
-Jesse Chun
In my work, I transform various passports’ watermarked backgrounds into large-scale landscapes by employing methods of appropriation, scanning, and digital manipulation. I re-frame and erase details of the images so that they are devoid of their bureaucratic function, national symbols and cultural specificity. What remains are landscapes of boundless nature. In this gesture, the landscapes become metaphors for our collective identity and transit. My landscapes reveal the ideology, interrogation, displacement and dreams that become a part of who we are.
-Jesse Chun