We recently connected with Emily Eunnuri Lee Dobbs and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Emily Eunnuri , appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
August 6th, 1997 the Korean Air Flight 801 crashed in Guam. My birth parents were part of the 229 people that died. I was only 4 months and 12 days old when I lost the people who were going to pass down their years of wisdom, the people who were supposed love me unconditionally, the people who gave me the gift and curse of living life without them. This was the source of my grief, and where my journey of resilience began. Soon after my parents passed, I came to America under a visitors visa and illegally immigrated under my aunts care. The name I was born with 은누리 (Eunnuri) roughly translates to “silver covering the world” or “silver universe” – was changed to “Emily”, the faces of people who mirrored my monolids and high cheek bones were replaced with blond hair and pale skin, and the country that holds my heritage and traditions were far from my reach. Being raised in America came with a very unique resistance in the form of cultural diaspora – too Korean to be American yet too American to be Korean. Along with the grief of losing my parents, I had to also grieve the fragmentation of my identity. I found that I encountered resistance the most. Resistance in healing, resistance in seeing reality, resistance in acceptance, resistance manifested physically in different forms such as denial, drug addiction, the decline of my mental and emotional health. Until June 8th, 2021 in the middle of the night, a fire burned down my art studio in Downtown LA Little Tokyo. In a handful of hours I lost all of my art. materials and the last remaining moments of my birth parents. That morning when I learned of the fire I couldn’t help but laugh. I couldn’t cry even when I tried – I remember thinking to myself “crying is the healthy thing to do”. This was the breaking point of my battle with resistance. Instead of resisting I decided to change, to let myself give into the process that is transforming, to accept that healing is not a linear path. So, after this long yet incredibly shortened story of my life, where I get my resilience from is being vulnerable enough to let myself heal. My resilience comes from continuing to heal, love, grow, and feel everything that this lifetime has to offer.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I am an interdisciplinary artist working in content creation and art practice. My mediums of choice are painting, sculpture digital information and archival media. My practice often incorporates the feeling of fragmentation and loss then recreates ideas of identity on the canvas. I often address themes of cultural diaspora, ethnic plastic surgery, and Asian-American hybridity. What makes my work special is the alternation between personal narrative and social activism whilst investigating the effects of media, race and intersectionality. I believe in the power of art and how it used to be the foundation and backbone of social, cultural and political revolutions. The art I make is not with the intention to sell and make money, but to be in history books, museum collections and be a part of something bigger than just myself. Recently I was given the amazing opportunity for my first solo show in San Francisco since losing my work in a studio fire in LA. The show is still up at Uzay Gallery (@uzay.gallery) and moving to LA in late November! You can follow my instagram for more details since the show date still has not released which is @eunnuri_lee.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
These 3 concepts were and are the most important key parts of my journey not only as an artist but as a person. The most important quality is empathy, the most important skill is self-awareness, and lastly the most important area of knowledge is communication. To improve your empathy whenever you feel uncomfortable thats not necessarily a bad thing. I encourage the exploration of that discomfort and to put yourself in others perspectives and hearts. My journey with self-awareness starts with being too self-aware and then intellectualizing my emotions and thoughts. Which is yes technically self-aware but thats not the self-awareness I’m thinking of. It’s a great start but going to therapy is ultimately what helped me learn how to process and understand myself on an emotional and spiritual plane. Finally, the best thing that developed my communications skills was practice! In short, the best advice I can give is get comfortable being uncomfortable, you can’t grow and change if you’re consistently doing what you’ve always done.
Alright, so before we go we want to ask you to take a moment to reflect and share what you think you would do if you somehow knew you only had a decade of life left?
A challenge I’m currently facing has been the relationship I’ve had with my adoptive mother. Although we are not speaking as of now, I am working through years of unprocessed anger, trauma and grief that will ultimately better not only myself but my ability to communicate with others openly and honestly.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @eunnuri_lee
- Other: Tiktok: @eunnuri_lee
Image Credits
1st and 5th image are @jadacarmen.t 3rd image is @hwilliamsjrphoto
