ISSUE 04
Soul Rebel
In terms of it being a tool to work through grief, I think scent helps access and articulate kind of, you know, the unimaginable. And because it’s ephemeral in nature, I think it really is able to help sort of bridge worlds. It’s less concrete. And usually in this world, especially in the Western world, we don’t really choose to engage in those things and they aren’t rewarded—you know, the imperceptible.
KENNY
A lot of what we hear about is being caught between this binary of like your Americanness and your Asianness, and I think your work sits in a sort of dimension outside those things which presents an opportunity to dwell in a space that’s more abstract. And there are many layers to your work that deal with grief and a way of processing grief through visuals not associated with time or any easily recognizable place.
I think one of the top layers is the long grief as an adopted person and as someone who is trying to create a new relationship to whatever home means. And the idea of searching for something that you can’t necessarily get back to in a logical grid of space and time. But the stretch to search for that in a more abstract sense in your work feels really beautiful and specific.
And how stretching our senses is vital in trying to get to places that are not already within our reach. I think it was in one of your Varyer Transmissions, but the idea that we don’t typically have lots of language for scent because the way our brain processes olfaction is very separate from the way our brain processes language.
But I think your work shows us why it’s really crucial to force our brains to make those new connections in order to access, I don’t know, a different set of questions at a time when there are not very good answers. Right?
SE YOUNG
Yes.
KENNY
….Great.
SE YOUNG
😅
KENNY
All to say, I’m really fascinated by scent as a medium because it feels unknown. But it also is just a different way of thinking and moving through the world.
And so I guess the question is: How has that work helped you to process on a personal level and what have you discovered in focusing on scent as a medium in exploring grief?
SE YOUNG
I think that it’s just allowed, honestly, an opportunity to feel more embodied which is kind of a gift. Especially as an adopted person, it’s a really common thing to feel disembodied or to sort of want to dissociate.
I don’t want to flatten the adopted experience at all because it’s so personal but I will say that from the community of people that I am in and other things that I have read and researched about, it’s because of the early trauma of, you know, separation. If you’re a transnational adopted person, separation from your place of birth and your birth family and just the lack of mirroring that can happen, you know, from an early age. And sort of your insides not matching your outsides—all those things.
So by working with scent—it’s a slow medium, you know? You really do literally take a deep breath in. You use your diaphragm, you can feel your rib cage expanding. You know, it’s grounding. You’re just really getting inside yourself. And I’ve found it to be just an expansive practice in that way.
And how because scent is so rooted in the interplay with memory, the way we have our own personal associations with it. As we go through our memories and our histories, when you’re an adopted person, you may not have a perceptible history. But that lives in your body. And as long as we’re talking about the Asian American diaspora, I think a lot of us hold so much in our cellular walls that people may not really give credence to—you know, from many wars. There’s just so much there.
KENNY
Yeah.
SE YOUNG
So I guess in terms of it really being a tool to work through grief, I think scent helps access and articulate kind of, you know, the unimaginable. And because it’s ephemeral in nature, I think it really is able to help sort of bridge worlds. It’s less concrete. And usually in this world, especially in the Western world, we don’t really choose to engage in those things and they aren’t rewarded—you know, the imperceptible. But I think that it is a very helpful tool in trying to sort of flesh out some of those ideas.
KENNY
Yeah. And so the connection is really in using that sense to sort of access something more abstract inside of ourselves that kind of pierces through the everyday input of what we see and what we hear in order to access realities and worlds that exist in deeper pockets of our minds.
SE YOUNG
Yes, yes.
KENNY
The connection to grief is that it helps you to land on new places not tied to any past memory in a world where there is a feeling of loss and where something feels, um, sort of irreversibly changed, right?
SE YOUNG
Yes.
KENNY
And so I guess because you have different disciplines in your work, when did scent become a part of your practice and a focus for you? I know it traces back to when you were a kid, but as you were exploring your work as an artist, what are the things when you are focused on scent that feel different than just digital collage or other visual work?
I know digital collage has part to do with world-building as well, but I feel like to sink into olfaction and scent—there was probably a thing that opened up something inside of you in the way that you process the ideas that you’re trying to grapple with or work through. Is there something that once you arrived at scent as an artist that shifted your own relationship with your work and what you explored?
SE YOUNG
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think even the digital collages—they exist, of course, in that format but those aren’t really the final form I ever imagined them in. You know, like A Clearing—the final form is on a digital printed silk textile.
I mean I feel lucky that I think the digital work does translate and speak to people and is accessible in that way. But for me, I don’t necessarily feel like they’re their final form. And their physical form—I imagine them to be, you know, definitely not a 2D, flat object at all.
KENNY
Mm hmm.
SE YOUNG
And I just feel like scent—I realized it was a vehicle to really sort of help express environments, help give I guess maybe a language especially to emotions that don’t live comfortably in the binary, which is obviously what grief is.
I think that also because scent is so subjective, you can’t tell somebody when they smell something and they say, this is what I think of, this is the way it makes me feel—you can’t tell them that they’re wrong. Because of the way, again, that the engagement with your scent memory—how everyone’s is so different and their associations are so different that it’s like it’s a different world.
Like you look at a picture. It’s like, okay well these are the realities—even though I don’t necessarily believe that that’s so cut and dry either. But it’s a language we put more clear parameters on, right?
KENNY
Right.
SE YOUNG
So I think that because scent sort of makes people rifle through their own memories, their own associations—
KENNY
Because of a lack of a collective language bank to pull from to describe the things we smell?
SE YOUNG
Yes.
KENNY
Got it. So because of that lack of whatever you wanna call it—fluency—to describe scent, it forces you as an individual to pull from things that don’t exist out there which forces you to form your own depths?
SE YOUNG
Definitely. Yes. And, you know, culturally—especially as Americans—there are so many different experiences that we’re pulling from. So I think, yes, there’s things that we perceive to be universal still. But, you know, that’s never really the case. And “universal” can be quite flattening and boring to be honest. And I think that scent is quite fluid in that way.
KENNY
Mm hmm. Yeah. I think it’s all really—that’s what I mean by it being just a different way of thinking and processing. I think it’s interesting that it’s something that becomes so personal because it doesn’t already exist.
That’s what you feel in your work. That there is not—for me, anyway, because olfaction and scent is new to me—there isn’t a reference point necessarily. It feels like it’s in conversation with your own really specific story, which I think is really fascinating from an artistic perspective.
SE YOUNG
Yeah, it is really relying on a specific interplay with each individual. And each of their experiences.
KENNY
Yeah. And how that allows you to try to navigate through work that is very specific to you in the way that your experience as an adopted person is much more specific than the poles that our larger stories still kind of float between.
SE YOUNG
Yeah. Yeah, and again, because of its ephemeral nature, I think that the reason why it’s really helped me sift through ideas of grief on a larger timeline is because I think that, you know, I’ve struggled with feeling guilty for not feeling a certain way during grief. I think that you sort of self-police in that way where you’re like, oh I should be crying right now. Or I should be angrier or things like that. And I think that, you know, it helps you be able to feel comfortable in a space where there’s more than one truth available and correct at one time.
KENNY
Yeah. And a different way of parsing through your own memories.
SE YOUNG
Yes.
KENNY
And to your point of the digital landscapes or the digital collages, why is it important that they exist in a physical form to reach the truest expression of what you’re trying to access?
SE YOUNG
I wouldn’t necessarily say truest, but I think maybe—like I said, I am very glad that they get to live in the digital form because I do think that it’s accessible. And to have your work be able to be perceived and accessible—I think that it’s really important. And I’m happy to be a part of that conversation in how it can reach people digitally.
But I think I imagine them out of those worlds, taking them out of those worlds, because materiality is really important to me. Something that is either perceptible to the eye or sometimes to the touch or things like that.
KENNY
Yeah. And if you view scent as a portal to get to that headspace to create those collages and to access that kind of psychic memory, it feels like it’s important for it to manifest in a physical form because it’s a way of returning back here from where you go in that portal to access those worlds. And the physicality of it brings it back to this world, which completes that cycle of why you go there and what that does for you to kind of process grief back here in this reality.
SE YOUNG
Definitely. They’re all sort of markers in different dimensions that are in conversation with each other.
KENNY
Yeah. And I think, you know, we kind of touched on one layer, a top layer, of your personal grief that scent deals with but I think another layer to it is a kind of collective grief of the last few years of the pandemic, right?
I think I’ve been thinking about grief as a collective emotion that we’re not dealing with as a culture. And the idea of our capacity to love being connected to our capacity to mourn. And even though there’s kind of a human pathology of snapping back to normalcy, you could feel something isn’t right. I remember last year just feeling in this city that we weren’t dealing with what we’ve lost and I think that is, to put an emotion to it or one word to it, grief.
And I guess what are those concentric circles for you of how the individual grief sits within the larger cultural grief in how your work navigates that? Because your work in scent started before the pandemic, right?
SE YOUNG
Yes.
KENNY
So how has this additional layer of collective grief built upon your personal navigation of it?
SE YOUNG
I guess to be honest it just compounded everything—for a while. It was just so intense. But also it just gave me permission to really just go there. I think that because we had moments of like true stillness and quiet, I was really able to process quicker and deeper than I would have if we were not locked down.
But, you know, I think that it was—I’m not sure if helpful is the word—but I do think that because culturally we’re so individualistic, that the pandemic did shine a light on just how fractured communities are and were, and how it was really a catalyst for a lot of people to sort of reevaluate their values in a serious way.
KENNY
Yeah.
SE YOUNG
But just to be able to look another human in the eye, you know? Especially when we were all masked still—to sort of just be able to really give space to the fact that you were sharing something. I do really think that for the first time a lot of people in this country understood, really, what collective experience felt like.
KENNY
And being forced to sit with uneasy feelings which we hate as a society that is so sort of fixated on having a nice day.
SE YOUNG
Having a nice day and keeping it moving.
KENNY
Right. And hustling. I think it’s interesting to think back to that time and what we gained. During the pandemic, one of the projects I built around Patrick’s work—one of the questions I posed to students was that obviously there’s so much destruction and things that are crumbling, but thinking about your future self, what do you want to actually carry with you from this time when things are more still?
And I think it’s interesting thinking about your work and how the collective pandemic grief sort of caught up to the things that you were navigating on a personal level. And maybe feeling less alone in trying to parse through grief when you knew that—even though it’s different—there was a larger community dealing with the feeling of loss.
SE YOUNG
Oh yeah, I think a larger consciousness for sure. People seemed more open to ideas of interconnectedness. And people could kind of meet you at a baseline of just, at the very least, feeling unsettled, you know? And coming to certain ideas, emotions, that maybe they hadn’t slowed down to deal with—ever.
KENNY
I think it’s really interesting to think about how because of the pandemic, what that stillness actually opened up for you, at least in my understanding of your work, is in a weird way kind of a pivot to dealing with grief in a larger American context actually. And that continuing this work that was so personal actually spoke much more directly to what we were experiencing obviously globally, but I think in the specific ways that we as a country have dealt with it, or not dealt with it.
I wonder—or did it at all make you feel kind of more tied to something outside of yourself, something outside of your own raft of trying to paddle through that?
SE YOUNG
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I think also that time gave way for people to sort of make connections that they hadn’t necessarily made just in terms of how systems work in this country. I mean globally, again, but also very uniquely in an American way. And the interconnectedness of those systems and their design and how they harm people. And I think there was just a general layer that was ripped off of that protective veneer.
KENNY
Mm hmm.
SE YOUNG
I really moved around that time, I joke, feeling like just a raw, exposed nerve.
KENNY
Yeah.
SE YOUNG
And I think upon those realizations, sort of figuring out your place, your people, what makes up a foundation. I mean, I think that you and I have talked about the word “community” and how it’s been sort of—
KENNY
Co-opted.
SE YOUNG
—thrown around and co-opted. And even of Asian American identity and how—this is not to disrespect the work that has been done because there has been, you know, a lot of foundational work done by ancestors in this country. But I will say that sometimes for me as an Asian American person, I feel like it feels like we’re still in this sort of adolescent phase of really trying to try on identities in that way.
KENNY
Yeah.
SE YOUNG
So I feel like by sort of zooming out and being witness to the way other people were suffering, but also—
KENNY
In an Asian American context?
SE YOUNG
In an Asian American context but also in just an American context, I think that I was able to just feel and be in search of a connection that I hadn’t felt compelled to before.
I think that because also Asian American identity has been so fraught in just the literal creation of it because it spans so many cultures. I mean, god, it’s impossible to find an apt container, right?
KENNY
Right, right.
SE YOUNG
And I do think that it is really important to listen with compassion to so many points of view. And a lot of it is pain.
KENNY
And a scarcity mindset because there was nothing for so long and now there’s some things.
SE YOUNG
Oh, absolutely. And from all angles.
KENNY
Yeah. And I think LA as a city, for all its shit and noise, I think one of the things that I really hold onto is that some of the physical space leads to less of a scarcity mindset. Especially in artist communities and creative communities. That it feels less competitive in certain ways and there’s a feeling here that lends to allowing for kind of the multiplicity of stories to exist.
SE YOUNG
Definitely.
KENNY
I guess looping back from that tangent to the point of grief and American identity, I think one thing I was thinking through is the connection between leaning into the stillness of the pandemic as a sort of zen practice within a kind of solitary confinement and using scent as a portal to allow your mind to travel at a time when your body is stuck in place. And the way that that connects to things in A Clearing, and things with your brother as well. Sitting in your work, I saw that as a parallel that I thought was interesting.
And again, knowing how terrible the pandemic has been, but seeing what it triggered in the kind of absolute darkness that we were in—in searching for those pieces of light that I think is what art deals with. And what is really beautiful about that in your work as someone who is searching for that through scent.
SE YOUNG
Yeah. I mean, I think giving people different access points in an impossible situation is important.
KENNY
Yeah. And the scent part is interesting to me because of the loss of smell and of anosmia as a symptom of COVID.
I think it’s an interesting dynamic that the connection between the most unexplored sense in a certain way and the association of scent and aroma with luxury and femininity and, you know, perfume and flowers and things that in our society maybe we don’t consider necessary. That, again, the pandemic triggered something where once you realize that it’s something you can lose, that’s when you start paying attention to the value of it, right?
SE YOUNG
Yeah. I would say, above all, it’s very undervalued because it’s, like you said, associated with maybe superfluous things—the feminine, but it also talks to the way we think about pleasure, right?
KENNY
Mm.
SE YOUNG
And how pleasure is something that is seen as extra. It’s not something that we deserve to have every day. Which is also a very American mindset.
KENNY
Right.
SE YOUNG
It’s like, work > reward. It’s like, okay, I can get this delicious meal for myself if I have killed myself at work this week—then I’ll do that. And not only from a financial perspective. But again, it’s sort of like the suppression, the scarcity, and then I’ll allow myself to experience something pleasurable. It’s not like—
KENNY
Mm hmm.
SE YOUNG
As a culture I feel like we’re very either / or. Again, a binary way of thinking.
KENNY
Yeah. And so meaning that there’s been an opening to explore scent more because collectively so many of us—I haven’t personally—but through COVID have lost that sense? It’s like, because we were deprived of it, now we can explore its value a little bit more?
SE YOUNG
Yeah. I mean, I think so. Studies I’ve read about—like if you have long-term anosmia, you are often depressed. It’s just all these associations. You’re only deriving texture from food without it, and I think a lot of people misplace taste and scent and aroma. They just think that it’s all happening in the mouth, you know? And if you’re just eating for nutrient’s sake, that’s gonna get very old very quickly.
KENNY
Uh huh. It is that idea that until you see the loss of it associated with depression that you realize that it is not a superfluous extra.
SE YOUNG
Right. And it helps you decipher the world. And helps you understand what you’re putting in your mouth, you know?
KENNY
…
SE YOUNG
I mean In terms of how we’re feeding ourselves!
KENNY
Uh huh. No, for sure.
I think that kind of leads from scent and grief into scent and identity and the search for that as a transracial, transnational adopted person. That I guess the first thing I’m curious about is what are some of your scent memories as a child that you access now? I think about the image of you as a kid from what you’ve written about having to pass things under your nose to sort of identify them.
That it’s like, as a kid, maybe you didn’t know consciously but it was a way of searching for familiarity in a world where what you were seeing and what you were hearing on a daily basis maybe didn’t feel familiar. And somehow you knew in whatever it is—in your soul, in your gut—that there were other possibilities and other realms and other realities than maybe at that time your day-to-day circumstances suggested.
SE YOUNG
Yeah. I mean I think it’s also just like your body and how it’s being perceived and interpreted in an environment where you are the object of curiosity. And the thing that is out of place.
KENNY
Yeah.
SE YOUNG
But I guess scent memories—I will say growing up in the midwest, it’s definitely like fresh-cut grass. I had like a massive yard growing up. And that is something that I associate with my dad sitting on that rider mower for hours on the weekends. It’s definitely a distinct scent memory.
And then I wrote about it a little bit, but my mom—any products that she used. She didn’t necessarily wear a personal scent. But yeah, Paul Mitchell—this like very specific fruity hair spray that she would, you know, secure her French braid with.
KENNY
Does she still use it?
SE YOUNG
She doesn’t. But she did for a long time. For a long time.
KENNY
I was curious if you still smell it when you see her.
SE YOUNG
I mean, that hair spray does still exist. If I do smell it, it sends me right back there. I’m trying to think of any others but those two really do stick out.
And I know I wrote in the Varyer piece about, you know, when sort of my culinary and cultural world opened. We went to these Korean culture camps when we were elementary school-aged. And it sort of exposed and educated us about our birth culture. And just how totally foreign but at the same time deeply grounding those smells were coming from the kitchen. It was just such an intense sensory experience for like an 8 year old.
KENNY
Yeah.
SE YOUNG
Like, I don’t understand why I’m feeling overwhelmed. Like is it just because it’s so delicious and so unusual? Like what’s happening here? But I mean it’s definitely, again, speaking to living in multiple worlds and what is stored in your DNA and sort of what unlocks that. Those flavors—they really were able to sort of pierce through that veil, you know?
KENNY
Yeah. And what I love about that memory is, one, knowing that those camps existed. But it makes me think about how so much of Asian American stories of the last few years are tied to food, right? And that for a lot of us, whether it was tenuous or it was strong, food was that kind of connection to a culture that maybe you didn’t have outside of that. And that coming back to that anchor of food has, I think, been this source of comfort for so many reprocessing and trying to renegotiate your own identity through food you grew up eating if that was your access point.
But again pushing out of the binary of stories in thinking about the experience of a person who’s adopted, that food is actually another source of grief for what could feel like it was lost, or just a reminder of what wasn’t there.
And in reading about the memory of the Korean culture camps, I found it so beautiful in thinking about it as a break from whiteness at the dinner table, you know? And the idea of the experience of transracial adoption as a sort of isolated immigration experience without the family unit. And how that’s compounded when you don’t have that tie to the food at the dinner table, which from personal experience is a memory of intimacy and a tie to that family unit and a larger culture. That even though it was one week in the summer, that that camp could provide some connection to that idea of what could have been, or should have been, or was a possibility in a different reality.
And again, the power of scent with what you were talking about to access and pierce through to the ancestral walls of your memory that I think is such a beautiful concept in having that connection as a kid with your brother out of the day-to-day context in very white spaces. And finding that access through Korean snacks and Melona bars and sesame seed oil as it plays off of bologna sandwiches and Cool Ranch Doritos.
I think there’s something just so kind of intoxicating about the idea of that memory. I’m just curious about what you still hold inside yourself from that kind of reprieve that you would have in the summers.
SE YOUNG
Yeah. I mean obviously I’m extremely privileged to have been able to have that experience provided for me. Cause I know there are so many transracial and transnational adopted people that did not have access to those kinds of experiences and haven’t had the food of their birth culture until they’re in their twenties.
KENNY
Yeah.
SE YOUNG
And I can’t imagine how painful that must be for people. So I do want to recognize that. But yeah, I mean it just gave me, you know, a new fluency to something that I knew that I contained within my body that wasn’t necessarily accessible, perceptible. It gave me connection, it gave me overwhelming comfort in a way that I didn’t expect—and that I probably couldn’t articulate when I was a child.
KENNY
Of course.
SE YOUNG
But again, it was more than having, like, a full stomach of delicious food. It was a complete sensory experience of feeling very connected. And proud. You know?
KENNY
Yeah.
SE YOUNG
And I know that, again, through the diasporic Asian American lens, there are people that were traumatized because of, you know, the strong smells—
KENNY
The smelly lunch stories.
SE YOUNG
Yep. Being ridiculed, all of those things. And, um, that’s—
KENNY
Interesting, it’s like the inverse of that.
SE YOUNG
Yeah. Yeah, but I wasn’t bringing that to school.
KENNY
Of course.
SE YOUNG
But in that experience, my mother definitely tried to replicate that food in the house for special occasions. And that was like—I mean, also feeling very lucky that my parents, for being two lifelong midwestern white people, were very adventurous.
KENNY
Especially at that time.
SE YOUNG
At that time, like with food—my parents still keep kimchi in their fridge now. They both love it. I’m actually very fortunate.
KENNY
Yeah. I’m sure it’s also, you know, a connection to you.
SE YOUNG
Yeah. It does feel like some sort of unspoken, not acceptance, but just sort of an act. Like a direct action to sort of move the dial closer so we can meet in the middle.
KENNY
Totally. I think it’s way beyond acceptance. It’s like preserving your kids’ trophies from when they were a kid in their room. The idea of keeping kimchi in your fridge to maintain a connection is so sweet and beautiful.
SE YOUNG
Yeah. I’m very lucky to have that for sure.
KENNY
I think what that story and that memory made me think about, which I’m always interested in when writing about food, is how much more food means than the way that it can be written about and how food memories are so tied to this idea of comfort.
And how what we call comfort food is like this idea of food that we ate when we were kids. And even fast food meals because I think they taste but also because they smell the exact same as we remember them as a kid. And so when you’re eating in times of stress, if you’re eating whatever it is that you go to in those moments, I think it transports you back to being a kid in the back of the van eating that thing that I think is just so interesting in the possibilities of travel that food contains.
SE YOUNG
Yeah, absolutely. I think they assuage not only the material need but definitely an emotional need most of the time for people whether they’re aware of it or not.
KENNY
Totally. And I think similarly to scent, so many people don’t have language for what they get from that food, what they get from what that portal is or what it triggers in you in that comfort. You just think about liking certain foods. But I’m interested in kind of trying to find the language to explore how food impacts us more abstractly in our bodies and I think scent is a really interesting way into that.
SE YOUNG
Absolutely.
KENNY
Last thing on this is that one of the points that you wrote about is the theory that eating a diet similar to your ancestors is the way to achieve optimal health.
SE YOUNG
Yes, yes.
KENNY
I love that idea.
SE YOUNG
Stephen Le, a biological anthropologist, has written about this. The book is 100 Million Years of Food. But yeah, I think that it makes a lot of sense, you know? Just from an evolutionary standpoint.
KENNY
Completely.
SE YOUNG
And just why my digestive system was completely at odds with my midwestern upbringing.
KENNY
I think that’s so fascinating. And why that experience in that Korean camp, too, was that tie to hit the cellular walls of your ancestral memory. I think that’s real. I really do. What we put into our bodies, I really do think that there is a generational memory to that. Like there has to be—I don’t want to get too off topic, but the reason that so many Asian people are lactose intolerant is that it’s tied to an ancestral diet.
SE YOUNG
Absolutely. Yeah. A lot of cultures are not really adept to handle lactose on a major level, you know?
KENNY
Yeah, it’s probably something we should pay more attention to. If your body can’t process it, there’s probably a good reason. Rather than trying to force that milk in with the help of pills. Get in there!
But I just think the kind of knowledge of your parents at the time to even seek out a Korean camp, or even for your mom to cook those Korean meals, is a kind of emotional intelligence that I think hits at something that came up when I was watching Earth Mama this week.
It deals with intersecting systems of the foster care system and systems of incarceration and the kind of industrial adoption complex and industry. It acknowledges that there are real human reasons why people want to adopt children. And it doesn’t present a sort of villainized version of parents who adopt a child, but it really centers the experience of the kind of impossible choices that mothers have to make in a system built on selling kids.
SE YOUNG
Yeah and white supremacy.
KENNY
And—
SE YOUNG
Lack of resources.
KENNY
Yeah. And a lot of what we know about experiences outside of our immediate realities are from media. That I think of how the history of portrayals of adoption in media have centered the adopting parents, which are often white parents, and this idea of saving children from a foster care system. Or from—
SE YOUNG
“Poor” countries.
KENNY
Yes. And I think that’s such a demented perspective in our understanding as a society of adoption. And yes, there are many kids in foster care, there are orphans in the world. But the film forces you to sit with the human choices of mothers having to give up their children and a system that makes a business out of sitting in those gaps. And a kind of spiritual sickness it can conjure against images of a natural world.
SE YOUNG
Yeah, I think it’s powerful for the adopted community that there are just more and more stories centering, you know, the people that have lost. And that’s the birth family and the adopted person themselves.
KENNY
Yeah. And as a parallel, being able to look back through the period of Korea’s history and why there are 250,000 transnational Koreans adopted out of war and the ravages of war that created the circumstances where so many Korean babies had to experience that reality. And how that blank space between where you come from and where you ended up can be really haunting.
SE YOUNG
Part of grieving for me as an adopted Korean person is actually contending with the haunting of the diaspora, which is also the title of a book by Grace M. Cho, who explores these historical intricacies. The 35 years of Japanese occupation, U.S. imperialism and continued military presence, forced migration—all of it culminates in this existence of ghost worlds of what could have been. Who could I have become?
Also breaking through the myth that Korea was relinquishing children due to the economic devastation of war when at the height of the number of children leaving the country, Korea was already positioned as an economic superpower in the mid-to-late 1980s.
You didn’t have agency in leaving your homeland and your body was also leveraged as capital. We are talking hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, that were generated from Korean adoptions. Our bodies absolutely contributed to the rise of Korea having both economic and cultural influence globally.
KENNY
Mmm.
SE YOUNG
Adoption agencies knowingly falsified birth records as to why a child would be relinquished—their place of origin, their family of origin—in order to legitimize the need to find a baby a new home that would obviously translate to monetary compensation.
There are so many adopted people who, on their adoption papers, noticed that their stories were all so similar about being a baby abandoned on a doorstep or a police station that just—it just wasn’t possible, honestly, as a numbers thing. That’s why they started getting suspicious and calling for investigations. In many cases, the children were taken from their homes either by family members or other people without their knowledge. So basically, they were stolen.
It’s now believed that 80 percent of the records are falsified. That’s so many people’s lives treated with utmost disrespect and disregard for a person’s right to the truth of their origins, which to me is the bare minimum you could provide a child who had no agency. That leveled me. I had to stop several times upon listening to these facts and numbers. Just sitting with that in my body—the waves of loss I felt for those lives honestly just immobilized me.
That’s why I say adopted people build their worlds different. They have to assemble their lineage from half-truths which is a very isolating reality to live in. To not know someone that mirrors your reflection, grounds your existence—your body to this earth—is a wild, untethered feeling. It’s really destabilizing, again and again, to locate an access point and gain footing.
KENNY
Of course.
SE YOUNG
There is a group of adopted activists in Denmark—led by an amazing attorney, Peter Møller—working with truth and reconciliation commissions that address collective trauma and abuse in societies to expose corrupt adoption practices in Korea. The thing is, I don't know how likely as a society Korea will take accountability in the selling en masse of their children because this harmful system being partly established and supported by the government disrupts nationalistic narratives.
And now we are sitting at Korea having the lowest birthrate in the world. After continuously sending a quarter of a million of its children away over the span of seven decades. I understand there are geopolitical, socioeconomical intersections that have led up to this point but it's difficult for me to not see this as a reckoning, atonement to some degree.
KENNY
Yeah.
SE YOUNG
It’s a really wild thing to go into comment sections of like an op-ed or something that’s written by an adopted person. I would argue that it’s some of the most hateful—the vitriol that’s pointed towards an adopted person just talking about their lived experience is so violent.
KENNY
Coming from—
SE YOUNG
Coming from non-adopted people, of course. And this incessant need to believe in this, you know—
KENNY
Savior complex.
SE YOUNG
Yeah. And just that, you know, your life is automatically gonna be shit if you are not adopted. And how grateful you have to be.
KENNY
Right.
SE YOUNG
And just generally how fucked up that is. It’s very, very bizarre. And this need to control a narrative.
KENNY
Mm hmm.
SE YOUNG
It’s really, really intense. And I just think that, again, going back to sort of memory and grief and loss and scent. It’s like, just psychically, we have to travel from just all the layers of loss. And what can happen to people.
And through the work, I’m trying to give people some place to go. Just dip in for a respite if that’s the only thing that can happen, you know? They’re all offerings.
KENNY
Yeah. And I think in thinking through what you just said, there’s also a connection between being outside of that experience of adoption in the need to believe that adoption is the only answer—that that’s the only solution we can imagine because that’s what’s been presented to us.
And how that’s tied to our collective need to believe that putting people in jail is a way of reforming them, right? Even though we know based on data and experience that that is not true. That in the limited conception of justice and an idea of law and order—that that solution actually doesn’t address the problem.
SE YOUNG
No, no. And again paying attention to who it’s actually serving. Or who it claims to serve.
KENNY
And who is even dreaming up the possibilities of what the solutions are.
SE YOUNG
Yeah. One of the only accessible health data stats for adopted people is that we are four times more likely to die by suicide. That's never a talking point because society wants to continue to believe in the inherent goodness of adoption.
This is a traumatic experience for folks and I wish people listened to those of us who are living and who have survived and had the privilege of assembling existences.
KENNY
It’s just a human need for there to be kind of sharp corners to—
SE YOUNG
Yeah. You know, structures—they “uphold society” and people sort of can get their brains around them. And it’s the same thing with people’s views around incarceration. Like “can’t do the time, don’t do the crime” kinda shit.
KENNY
Right.
SE YOUNG
Where it’s kind of like, wow, if you haven’t been touched by this, I have to say you’re in a privileged position. Because a lot of people in their lives have made decisions and have just not been caught or charged for them.
KENNY
Yeah.
SE YOUNG
But it’s that sort of, again, insistent need to reinforce these narratives that these structures exist to help and better society.
KENNY
Yeah. And it’s the need for people with things that feel difficult to wrap your arms around to try to fit it in something for you to feel a sense of control over what exists in the world and order where in human behavior there really is not.
SE YOUNG
Absolutely not. Yeah, behavior and circumstance. You know?
KENNY
Yeah. And I think that gets us to A Clearing, which I really wanna talk about. When was that at ESMoA? It was last year, right?
SE YOUNG
No, that was two years ago. Wasn’t it? And it ran for six months.
KENNY
Okay yeah, yeah. I saw it at the tail end of it there. And I guess the second time I saw it was at the Institute for Art and Olfaction in Chinatown.
But can I read a quote that you wrote? I think it was from Varyer. But I think it kind of builds on all the things we’ve been talking about with scent. And in your work, using it as a way to process grief.
SE YOUNG
Sure.
KENNY
You said, “Amid the collective grief the world is now confronting due to the pandemic, I have been working through the personal and unexpected loss of my brother. I’ve looked to the senses in an attempt to reorient and ground myself and…I believe that if we can hone in on the power of our sensory input, we can use what we let in to (re) build our worlds by accessing memories to construct the space we need to move fully embodied through our grief.”
And I think that as a foundation to or as a lens to approaching A Clearing—which, bear with me as I try to describe it as what I experienced.
The way that it’s sort of a reproduction of a reimagination of incarcerated spaces. And the idea of using scent and texture in confinement and incarceration as a portal to nature and to the world outside of it. And a digital landscape as a portal physically to nature and to space outside of it, but I think abstractly as a portal to a different reality and to different circumstances than the current one has created.
I think that was my first experience in really clicking into the possibilities of what scent creates—of really just the idea of scent as a portal. And of the effect of digital landscapes manifested physically. It’s an installation that’s immersive into really understanding incarceration on a spiritual level that plays with certain things that do exist in incarcerated spaces like the table setup and the mirror, but kind of offsetting it with how you’re subverting prison landscapes with a silk backdrop of nature and the scent—which in the first iteration at ESMoA was the mist of the woods that Barbara kept fiddling with.
SE YOUNG
😆
KENNY
But I’m thinking of at IAO, what that material on the brick was—which I think was meant to conjure the smell of the earth but also tied to what you talked about with a letter your brother had written while inside about missing the smell of fresh-cut grass as that foundation for a portal out of that experience. Right?
SE YOUNG
(Nodding)
KENNY
I guess my question is, I don’t know, anything you want to share about how you constructed that in your mind, how you constructed it physically, why it was important to deal with that in a physical sense? And the balance in being able to physically manifest the grief of knowing the reality of confinement by trying to place it in a different context.
SE YOUNG
Yeah, I mean I think that people that haven’t necessarily had the experience or their lives haven’t been touched by somebody being in the prison system—and I do want to state that the conditions of the way that people are treated and the details in the way they exist within prison walls are kept close to the chest.
KENNY
By the people experiencing it? Or by the system?
SE YOUNG
No, by the system, by the state—on purpose. Because I think if more people in the world were educated on just how dehumanizing the entire experience was, people would galvanize and, you know, rise up and really—
KENNY
Try to imagine something different.
SE YOUNG
Yeah. And just push for changes on a material level, if not the policies.
KENNY
Mm hmm.
SE YOUNG
So that being said, I think that going in to visit somebody that you love in those spaces is just so unsettling. And I mean of course it’s by design. It’s intimidation. You go through security, you have to take off your belt, take off your jewelry, go through a scanner. Usually the people working are very curt. And I’m being generous when I say curt.
KENNY
Of course.
SE YOUNG
And you go into a visitation room which from my experience, from my family’s experience, is always sort of modeled like a cafeteria kind of space. There’s several visiting tables.
And the silk textile in A Clearing is in reference to prison landscapes. And there’s an incredible book by Alyse Emdur where she documents these and they’re sort of punctuated by these incredibly moving letters from people on the inside.
But basically these landscapes exist as sort of—for many reasons, but I think for visitation, they offer a place where people and their loved ones can take a picture in front of. And, you know, you have to pay for the picture. And usually it’s like, somebody on the inside will keep one, and the family members are able to take one out.
KENNY
Yeah. The payment part is interesting because the whole prison system is a business, right?
SE YOUNG
Oh yeah.
KENNY
And to your point of the curtness, it’s designed for that business to continue to exist and for people to buy in to the idea that, you know, the system works. You have to create all of the levers that dehumanize and signal the idea that people that are stuck in that system are in there because they deserve it.
SE YOUNG
Yeah. And that they don’t deserve any sort of dignity and to be seen as human. And then if they do want to make a phone call—you know, have a connection to the outside world—it’s monetized. And in a very serious way.
KENNY
Right.
SE YOUNG
I mean I’ve mentioned before that we’re privileged in that fact that we were able to afford to put money in those accounts so my brother could make those phone calls.
KENNY
Mm hmm.
SE YOUNG
Sometimes he would call my mom twice a day at like 10 bucks a pop because he was miserable. You know? He was like—there were times when he was locked down 23 hours a day. And this is like in a minimum to medium security facility.
And just how much it’s just about control, it’s about breaking people’s spirits, it’s about suppression—speaking of senses. It’s like, I’m not saying they need to be fed five-star meals, but it’s like no nutritional value, no pleasure—any sort of thing that would be interpreted as pleasure. You know, having access to a window outside. Books sometimes were not allowed.
KENNY
Yeah.
SE YOUNG
And books definitely saved my brother for a long time. Just anything—
KENNY
I remember at IAO, you talked about how your mom would photocopy books to send to him so that he would have some sort of access to even a world in his head outside of that space.
SE YOUNG
Oh my god, yes. Yes. Any human would struggle in that situation where it’s like, your mind and your body are just not meant to be in that state.
KENNY
It’s inhumane.
SE YOUNG
It’s totally inhumane. And again, “rehabilitation”—
KENNY
It’s really not what the system is designed to do. It’s meant to punish you.
SE YOUNG
It’s meant to punish you. And that’s why the recidivism rate is so high. But they’re so good at what they do by setting up these systems and these structures of oppression. That’s why when people get out, they often reoffend because they’re so used to those structures that have conditioned them that that’s how they feel most comfortable.
KENNY
Uh huh.
SE YOUNG
Because there’s such lack of support when you get out. I mean it is very, very likely that somebody is gonna reoffend just to feel some sort of structure and safety in that—
KENNY
Familiarity. Even though it’s a fucked up version of it. But if it’s what you know—
SE YOUNG
Totally. If that’s all you know for even five years. I mean if you think about how technology is evolving at warp speed now, reentry work is also just something that I think people don’t think about. It’s like, oh you’re out.
KENNY
Right.
SE YOUNG
You know, especially when people don’t have the resources, the family, the finances—they’re coming out, and sometimes the state will give you like 100 dollars and a bus ticket. And good fucking luck, you know?
KENNY
Yeah.
SE YOUNG
I mean, it’s actually terrifying.
KENNY
Yeah. Yes. I think to the point of not even the incarceration itself, but the recidivism rate is because of the experience of wanting the familiarity of a community that doesn’t exist once you’re released when the stigma, even once you’ve served your time, is that you often can’t get a job—
SE YOUNG
Nope.
KENNY
You often can’t get housing.
SE YOUNG
Nope. Two of the major things that make you—
KENNY
It’s the basic levels of Maslow's principles. Where do you expect a person to go? When you can’t sleep somewhere with a roof over your head, you can’t survive in a society that requires money, and you don’t feel you have any effect on the world. Of course it makes sense that just on a human level you would revert back to a place. It is designed that way.
SE YOUNG
Yeah, and also just being labeled by society. You know? That doesn’t go away.
KENNY
And that’s also the community part where you’re at least back in a place where you’re amongst what feels like your peers.
SE YOUNG
Yeah. Yeah.
KENNY
But I guess looping back to A Clearing, I think what prison landscapes play off of even in the painted backdrop for photos—it’s such a basic version that’s just enough that they can charge you money to give you that illusion of freedom. But it’s not done with any kind of care, which is what your silk textile to nature is playing off of—reimagining if these prison landscapes were actually done in a way that centered the humanity of incarcerated people.
SE YOUNG
Yeah. You know, I will say that from what I’ve read and what I have absorbed, that a lot of the time the people on the inside that get chosen to make the backdrops, it’s considered a high honor because you get access to be creative—within very strict parameters. But inside, obviously, creativity is not encouraged. It’s not gonna be something that’s uplifted by the system. So that is like a piece of care from their own that’s going into painting these landscapes.
And it has to be done by hand—like it can’t be a photograph because cameras are not allowed in. So it is doing this thing where it’s the duality of like giving them the illusion but it’s also reflecting back that it is very much an illusion. And there’s pain there. And this being sort of the only opportunity to bridge worlds. I mean some people use these photographs for Christmas cards and things like that to communicate with family. You know, this is like the only chance that they get to have family portraits sometimes and to be with their loved ones instead of just disappearing them.
KENNY
Right. Right. But the whole point of that access to nature is the feeling of freedom in your spirit, right? And the feeling of openness and expansiveness.
SE YOUNG
Yes.
KENNY
But this version of it is so tightly controlled within a payment system, within when you’re able to take that picture, that it actually takes away all of what nature is supposed to provide.
SE YOUNG
Right.
KENNY
Which is what is so affecting in seeing it move as a silk backdrop in A Clearing because it is getting outside of a very static confine of incarceration in the way that you imagined what a different kind of prison landscape, nature landscape could be.
And, you know, when you think of portraits of people against a landscape, it makes me think of the idea of negative space, right? And how negative space helps give shape. And the idea of a backdrop of nature as a landscape is a way of understanding and knowing ourselves in the negative space.
SE YOUNG
Yes. Yes. And for me, it’s also important that that work is not super specific in terms of not being referential. I mean, yes, I use specific plants, things like that—but it’s more about people finding their own way into it. That it’s not like a super realistic landscape that you can recognize.
KENNY
Yeah, yeah. And even the physical space—the choice of table that gives a sense of kind of that cafeteria style with the deliberate choice of color that is very much not the brown and beige in a prison space. The seafoam green color is in conversation with the backdrop and with nature, right? And the material that’s there on the brick—is it terracotta? That again is a play off of what is there being inside of brick walls but using these different sensory details as a way out of it.
SE YOUNG
Yes. Well just speaking from a material standpoint, there’s a lot of different rocks that are porous. So they work well as vehicles to deploy scent because they absorb it and they hold it quite well. And terracotta is one of those.
KENNY
Got it. And what it’s gesturing at is just the idea of earth?
SE YOUNG
Yes.
KENNY
And in my head it was tied to the idea of fresh-cut grass. Was that in there?
SE YOUNG
Oh, yes. I mean the actual scent held within that, yes. And that is referential to earth or grass.
KENNY
And again as a portal to outside and how few touchpoints you have once you’re inside to something as simple as grass.
SE YOUNG
Yes. That most people wouldn’t necessarily consider as a luxury or a way to access your own humanity—to see yourself as part of the collective experiencing the world.
KENNY
Yeah. And the fact that it is what’s beneath our feet that we don’t pay attention to. That it’s not even flowers or jasmine or these things that are more associated with pleasure.
SE YOUNG
Right.
KENNY
I think part of what is so affecting in being in that construction of that space is it does force you to confront what you think the system even is trying to do.
I love reading Mariame Kaba’s work because I think it’s important in thinking about abolition, or in pushing towards it in thinking about the language that we even use to describe these systems. It’s called the criminal justice system to construct that it is some sort of version of justice when what she calls it is a criminal punishment system, which is much more—
SE YOUNG
Accurate.
KENNY
It’s more precise. And one of her ideas that I hold onto is individual justice versus a collective one. That the prison system is based on this idea that you can punish individual people into this fantasy that our society will then be rehabilitated.
SE YOUNG
Yeah.
KENNY
But the human toll of that perspective of justice which is based in vengeance is that you break the spirit of an individual person. And the way that you do that is by withholding beauty from them. Because I think that what books do and what an access to nature or to scents does is that it connects you to—it lets your spirit at least be reminded of beauty on the outside.
And I think that the human spirit can withstand a lot when you at least have some kind of connection to beauty. Even if you are incarcerated. If you wanted to design a less dehumanized version of even the current prison system—you can do that, right? But I think when you completely deprive a human being from any access to spiritual beauty, there’s no way that that will lead to any kind of rehabilitation.
SE YOUNG
No regeneration, no. The fact of the matter is that prison is where so many people have ended up because of their addictions and punitive punishment exacerbates the problem. My brother, along with so many, deserved the dignity of proper treatment for addiction as an illness. The intersection of society, healthcare, and government failing lets law enforcement—because they’re a sector that is very well funded—absorb the complicated task of getting adequate and appropriate care for folks.
KENNY
And there’s a disconnect between addressing the collective systems and circumstances that create the choices that people have to make that sometimes lead to decisions that lead to ending up in the system. And taking an individual approach to addressing collective, systemic issues will never be the solution to the problem of whatever you want to call it—crime.
That I think A Clearing is interesting in conversation with the idea of abolition because I think in her work, the push for abolition is not even it as a final target. It’s to push at possibilities of other solutions that are not in the collective imagination right now, that are not in the reality of where we let our minds wander.
Going back to what we first started talking about with scent as a portal, it’s about trying to access wisdom, solutions in another timeline, in another realm, to try to bring that back and bring another dimension of possibility back to the really shitty options that we have in this reality.
SE YOUNG
Yeah. I think that we have to take a look at who and what are valued in this society. Who is vulnerable and, therefore, disposable? And what that even really means. And how that’s changing. And why should we be concerned with something that doesn’t directly seem to affect our immediate circle.
KENNY
Yeah.
SE YOUNG
And even if we zoom back out in terms of, like, the legibility of an Asian American body—which Ocean Vuong talks about a lot. You know, what that means, what that really can look like, where we’re perceived. I mean I just think that, again, it’s pushing back on the systems, expectations, and really using imagination as a tool for formidable change.
KENNY
Yeah.
SE YOUNG
And that might sound really out there, but I mean, this is the power of the human mind that we’re talking about. You know?
KENNY
Totally. And also the possibilities in the sort of searching and the kind of existential reach that art can and often does, in the work that I’m interested in and the artists that I’m interested in, tend to explore.
SE YOUNG
Yeah.
KENNY
The last thing I had that you wrote about was how after the loss of your brother, you lost the ability to listen to music with words. And the idea that words weighed down your ability to listen to music, I think, because there weren’t words to express or kind of be in conversation with the grief that you were feeling.
And I thought it was interesting to think about another aspect of multisensory exploration in that listening to music without words allowed you to see and focus on colors and shapes and textures in the music.
And I guess: How does that play off of the way that you process scent? Is it the same, is it different in, I guess, using one sense to access one thing but experiencing it in another. Does that make sense? Like using scent as a way to process emotions, and using music as a way to access a different realm of that music that isn’t focused on the words but what it conjures visually in a feeling?
SE YOUNG
Yeah. I mean I think for me they definitely are in conversation with each other in terms of, like, not feeling sort of boxed in or limited to feeling like you have to make certain choices.
KENNY
Hmm.
SE YOUNG
I think words—and they can give us so much and they can be so expressive. But I do feel that we often rely on them too much to convey whereas, you know, an instrument or a scent can just be so multidimensional in its approach.
KENNY
Right. Yes. As you were talking through it, I guess the connection that I couldn’t name is the limitations of language. And in both combinations of those senses—using scent as a way to feel or listening to music in order to see—it’s trying to find something that doesn’t exist in our current lex—
SE YOUNG
Lexicon, yeah. I think we as a culture, the hierarchy of how we process information, how we’re presented information—you know, it’s visual, and then words. And again, it’s things that we have been conditioned to understand as concrete.
KENNY
Mm hmm.
SE YOUNG
To have these foundational posts that make us feel rooted. And, you know, what kind of ideas are being presented when filtered that way.
KENNY
Yeah. Also the inundation of visual noise in the way we consume media. Or we live in a visual world because of how everything comes through our phones. And pushing into scent is something that mass technology hasn’t short-circuited and flattened.
SE YOUNG
No, it cannot communicate that.
KENNY
You can hear sound through media. But what you’re talking about is a manipulation of sound in a kind of fourth dimensional space into shape and color and texture and that feels outside of the boundaries of what work looks like so much these days in the static nature of our phones.
SE YOUNG
For sure. And I mean I think that when you’re not grounded in lyrics, too, you’re not bound to a narrative.
KENNY
Right. It opens up possibilities.
SE YOUNG
Yeah. And I think that is helpful when you’re trying to process different emotions, different events in your life.
KENNY
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, my last questions are around the idea of finding home in scented worlds.
As a Korean transnational adopted person, in all of your work I think there is that idea of world-building as a throughline that seems to be this sort of continued search for what that idea of home can mean in a world and an experience where that wasn’t the option.
SE YOUNG
Oh yeah, absolutely. Even though being raised out of my birth culture, out of my birth family—I mean, there’s always going to be a certain level of grief for that. But I don’t know, I do see it as, I guess, I get to choose what kind of Korean person I am in a different kind of way that I don’t necessarily feel beholden to understand and sort of like interpret my experiences through a familial lineage like somebody who comes from a multigenerational family, you know, through passed down stories, etc.
And, you know, I’ve come to understand and embody my Koreanness—I mean, I just think of myself and my life as a giant research project. And trying to be responsible in the way that I understand the history of the place that I was born.
But also there are just so many other factors in the consideration for, again, talking about the multiverse as a concept—not in a woo woo way, but just in constructing a reality out of my understanding of how it is that I exist in the place I exist.
KENNY
Yeah. And the kind of freedom of it is that without feeling tied to one idea of home is the possibility of feeling at home anywhere. And I think that’s what allows the sort of astral travel through these different sensory dimensions in your work.
And I guess in that way, it’s interesting to think about the total control that that gives you over your construction of your identity in the way that all of us are doing, even with different experiences. That I think it is a way of listening to the music of existence without being mired down by the words of it. That there’s another way of looking at your experience as an expansiveness of possibility.
SE YOUNG
Yeah.
KENNY
Which, you know, of course sits on top of or maybe under the more visceral grief. But I think there’s a really kind of beautiful place in trying in your work to sit in that place to get to that idea of making meaning of what it means to be alive.
We’re all really here on this earth alone trying to figure this stuff out, you know? Despite the illusions of what a traditional family unit provides, when you really really zoom out, to me it’s the work that you have to do as a human being, as individuals, to understand what we’re doing here. And I think about that as a different lens to the work that you do and the questions that you ask through it.
SE YOUNG
😶
KENNY
That’s actually an idea that I’ve talked to students about. There was a civic engagement program with the 92Y and Nithya Raman that I was teaching in LAUSD last year. And one of the ideas that we talked about—they were 6th graders—in thinking about grassroots movement is how real change starts at the local level.
One of the questions from a student grappling with these big ideas of what they wanted to see change in their communities and in the world was, “Is any of what we think or what we say gonna matter? Is anybody gonna listen to us?” Essentially because of our age because of the way that they’ve been conditioned by the education system in this country that’s very passive.
And the conversation we had is that we’re existing in a time where so much has changed in the last few years and the safeties that we’ve created to construct boundaries in our existence—a lot of those levers have fallen.
So I guess the comfort that you can take in a time of unpredictability and so many things falling is that the reality is that none of us know. Your teachers and your parents and the adults in your life—we actually don’t know either. And the thing that I wanted to reiterate for students is that we’re living in a time where at any age, the ideas that you have and the questions that you’re asking matter in the sense that none of us know. And you can focus on that fact as a negative, but I think it’s helpful that it forced a conversation to think about the possibilities in that, the possibilities in not knowing.
Which I think triggered that idea because it’s in conversation with what you were just talking about in your work of not knowing the different things that we think that we need to know to form an identity and to form, you know, the goal posts of moving through the world that actually are an illusion.
SE YOUNG
…
KENNY
I just talked at you.
SE YOUNG
No, you’re not. I think that sometimes, to your point, I think scent—because of the way that it touches each person so differently, it does help to sort of validate just so many different experiences and lives lived.
KENNY
Yeah, that’s why I’m actually so interested in the curriculum around scent I sent you for Las Fotos Project because it is so interesting at any age but I think especially for students to understand and to have access to these different modes of input where there are not right answers.
And that’s really the value of why arts education in the system of public education has always been the boat of possibility in the really narrow ideas in the way education works in this country. And in pushing for the academic value of the arts as a necessity in these systems that mirrors your point of scent and thinking of it as a luxury and an additive thing and how so often in the scarcity of public education in this country the arts are always seen as a luxury.
SE YOUNG
Right.
KENNY
And as an extra thing that isn’t a “core subject.” And so much of the value in sitting in arts education and arts integration and making that work real and not half-assed in these spaces, and working with artists that have something to say that are exciting to students and not just easy is that it expands the direction of knowledge in the room.
And when you think of the arts as something that’s a luxury and something that isn’t vital, it shapes the way that you produce those programs, right? And how much effort you put into curriculum because you don’t think about the tentacles of the way that that work reaches students and people in systems where they’re told in so many ways that their ideas don’t matter.
SE YOUNG
Yes.
KENNY
And that their opinions don’t matter.
SE YOUNG
Yep.
KENNY
And in classrooms that are a version of confined spaces. And that’s really the school-to-prison pipeline in that a lot of these schools especially in “underserved communities” are mirrored in the way that prison systems are designed with conformity in mind.
And I’ve seen the effects on students when they are respected enough to interact with art and complex ideas that don’t have right and wrong answers but just ask them to bring themselves to what they’re sharing with each other in those spaces. And the kind of connection and mind-body thing that happens when you’re not regurgitating information or you don’t view your education or your experience in school as something that’s passive, right? When you start to view knowledge and what you share as an exchange.
I think the tie back to your work is how the redirection of grief into beauty across all your work is an act of defiance and an act of hope. And it makes me think about a more complicated idea of hope that isn’t such a surface level version of it.
I love Mariame Kaba because I was in this program with the #SchoolsNotPrisons team two years ago now around transformative justice and how imagining better solutions intersects with my work as an educator. And her work was a part of the case studies. And one of the things—I think it was a podcast interview where she talked about the idea of hope.
She said, “Hope is a discipline. It’s work to be hopeful. It’s not like a fuzzy feeling. You have to actually put energy and time and you have to be clear-eyed and you have to hold fast to having a vision. It’s a hard thing to maintain but it matters to have it.”
And I see that as like a thesis statement in your work. It’s like the way that language has been corrupted or desensitized in thinking about something as saccharine as love. But I think hope is another version of that because of like the Obama “Hope” posters and the ways that that’s been shopped out. But it was her perspective that made me think about hope in this way that didn’t feel cheesy. And that felt like difficult work and important work in a world that feels like it’s folding in on itself in so many ways.
I think it’s so easy to fall into a cynicism of it. But reminding yourself that it’s all that there is as a wormhole out of what we are seeing—as a tie to something beyond right now and beyond what we can see on the horizon. And I see that all in your work.
But I think coming back to all of the ways that we’ve talked about scent and multisensory work as a portal, coming back to this world and this reality and this timeline that we’re in—in thinking about your experience growing up as a kid in not feeling tied to a simple, easy idea of home and what we just talked about in trying to find the other end of that in seeing the possibilities of that allowing you to feel at home in the world—I don’t know, when you think about that idea, what now at this age do you think about?
SE YOUNG
I think, you know, references to nature in my work are very strong. And I use a lot of flower motifs and things like that. And I do believe that a surface level beautification actually can be quite violent so I kind of want to make a distinction between those two things.
KENNY
What do you mean by that?
SE YOUNG
I mean, you know, you hear about public design initiatives and it’s like, “the beautification of a space.” And just thinking like, well what does that really mean? And through whose lens and who is it for?
KENNY
Right, right.
SE YOUNG
And is anybody else in the community that it’s supposed to be serving involved in the co-design? The lovely folks at Deem Journal have been influential in questioning the culture of design, intent versus impact.
So I guess wanting to be conscious of even bringing that element into the visual, the digital landscapes. And thinking like wanting to make something “beautiful” is going to fix something in this sick, sad world.
KENNY
Mm hmm, mm hmm.
SE YOUNG
I think that it’s important that it’s always going to be referential. It’s always going to be, you know, a thing there and a thing there. But it doesn’t quite live in one place in reality. And I think that’s important.
KENNY
Interesting.
SE YOUNG
And I also just want to thank you for sharing your experiences based in education and trying to find the throughline in your own work. I just believe in talking about these intersecting systems. And just how much of an effect they can have. It’s chilling when you realize that systems are designed to harm people. And the education system also giving you a narrative early on that your voice doesn’t matter. Or you’re somehow a bad person.
KENNY
Mm hmm.
SE YOUNG
It can be so devastating to your development.
KENNY
Completely.
SE YOUNG
And I know it was to my brother. A hundred percent. And although socioeconomically, we did not grow up in a school system that was needing resources in that way, it was still in my mind a version of a school-to-prison pipeline.
KENNY
Yeah.
SE YOUNG
And in the thinking and also punishing a body and a mind that didn’t align with what it was supposed to, you know? My brother had pretty bad ADHD and he wanted to stand doing his work and they hated that. Just those little things that become dehumanizing after a while.
KENNY
Nonconforming.
SE YOUNG
Yeah, nonconforming. And then you’re like, oh shit, I guess if they’re telling me I’m these things all the time, why don’t I just be these things?
KENNY
Yeah. I think there are a million different ways to feel invisible in a classroom. And, again, the circular nature of knowledge that art provides is that it directly gets at that idea that students can so often feel—which is, I don’t know the right answer. I don’t have the access to the answers so therefore, I’m gonna stay silent. I’m gonna fold into myself.
SE YOUNG
Yes.
KENNY
I’m going to make myself as small as possible and try to escape in whatever ways that I can. That’s all there, you know? And they’re all overlapping systems that create that. And the reason I’m interested in education and continue to be is that even though there are so many different institutions that do that in this country, the education system is in so many ways a foundation for possibility to shift that.
SE YOUNG
Of course.
KENNY
And the fact that it is so broken and so mired in capitalism, and such a byproduct and a symptom of what we value, there’s no way to fix the other things without focusing on education first.
SE YOUNG
Addressing, yes. One hundred percent.
KENNY
Not that it’s the only answer. But there’s no way of thinking about the possibilities for a different result from the ways we’re investing in our public schools.
SE YOUNG
Of our youth. When I reflect on my brother’s death from fentanyl poisoning at 33, I see all of it colliding as a fate orchestrated by the industrial adoption complex, the school-to-prison pipeline, and mass incarceration. I’m not saying that he completely lacked agency or personal responsibility, but it’s evident that the cards were stacked against him from his genesis. And there’s a pain in accessing an awareness of all those realities that imbues my life and funnels into the work as well.
KENNY
Yeah. But to your point of when you’re designing these sort of public exhibitions, public art, public offerings—what do you think your particular perspective and the things that your work has dealt with offers to the work that you try to offer up and try to infuse into your public offerings?
SE YOUNG
I think just empathy. And consideration for people’s complexities. And also people being experts in their own lives and the lives they’ve lived—their own experiences. And listening to people and giving them agency.
Because I think that you don’t do inherent harm sometimes when you’re imagining somebody else’s experience. And trying to sort of design something for that in mind. But by not going to the source and asking for direct input, and asking them to be your collaborator, I think that it can just set in motion something that can be harmful.
KENNY
And why in the world that we live in—why do you value the kind of conscientiousness you’re talking about?
SE YOUNG
I think I’ve always been a person—I like to observe before I do. I think that also comes from a hypervigilance that’s kind of a trait that’s sort of prevalent in adopted people. And sort of being very aware of your environment, being aware of other people’s comfort levels—you know, an acute observer of things.
And also I think just because I’ve had to straddle so many worlds and code switch and all of those things just to get through a day, I do think it’s really that consideration of empathy. Even though it seems more difficult now to do that than ever before because we are living in a time where it’s us versus them. It’s a reactionary culture. Because it’s so easy to distill talking points, you know? Which is so dangerous. And by not fostering conversations, I just think that empathy and just taking a beat and trying to imagine that person’s circumstance is very, very difficult. But I think that, again, just speaking to processing time that we’re allowed to have right now, it’s just really important.
KENNY
Yes. And to end on your own artist statement of inverting grief into hope. Or hope as a radical act in your work:
“As an artistic practice, I strive to conceive works from a place where loss is redirected into the creation of alternative worlds. Spaces are expressed with such incisive joy that it gives the viewer permission to experience emotions beyond the restrictive binary. My aim is to regain agency over my personal mythology, and to assert myself as fully embodied; a reclamation of spirit that defies space and time. My work, a composite of digital imagery, encapsulates multiple truths with diverging timelines; of lives existing simultaneously that unfurl in non-linear ways to repair what has been pillaged.”
Where do you find hope?
SE YOUNG
I think it is observing things in nature. Even though the state of nature can be climate doom and all of that. But just being able to—you know, Jenny Odell, the artist and author, she talks about really investing in deep exploration and the deep history of a place where you are. And sort of orienting yourself by thinking about even how the land came to be. How it formed. And just finding perspective in that. Just coming to some sort of peace just knowing that there’s so much noise but that there was quiet before us and that there will be quiet after we exist. And that is comforting.