My paintings are the result of a process of investigation into my personal cultural heritage – a journey which explores the effect on my own identity of being born into one culture, then subsequently being adopted into another very different one thousands of miles away.Using source material derived from my personal archive of family albums and landscape images of Sweden and Korea from the Internet, I began creating collages and other material experimental pieces, developing an amalgam of an experienced life and lost experiences.I explore both actual and imagined places. Through the activity of ripping (separation) and reassembling (integration) the images into collages, the psychological process of piecing together who I am and where I come from, is activated. Just like fragments of an identity are glued together by a variety of experiences, the jagged collage is taking shape. These collages then become the source for further material experiments – translating these collages into paintings is important to me. The material processes, variation of paint applications and use of strong colour are analogous to my investigations into my past.The painting process allows me to expand the potential of my ideas – reducing some of the overly specific imagery to something more universally accessible.My personal story is of course core, as it motivated my investigations into notions of identity, but there are also far reaching aspects to what I am saying that I want to address. This body of work has predominantly been influenced by Candice Breitz’s Factum series which explore the concept of identity in relation to the community, John Stezaker’s play with perception of identity in his collages, John Ká´“rner’s execution of painterly colour combinations, and René Magritte’s play on illusion and reality. Likewise have James Rosenquist and Peter Cauldfield inspired me aesthetically.