About

I spent most of my life hiding who I am.

I'm queer, genderqueer, mixed race, disabled, and for a long time I carried all of that quietly, like something to be managed rather than something to be celebrated. I am half Korean and half white, which means I have spent most of my life belonging fully to neither, circling a heritage I longed for but never quite felt at home in, and moving through a world that wanted me to be simpler than I am.

I didn't think of myself as an artist. I was a writer, until a head injury took my words from me. For years I struggled with daily migraines and the grief of losing the thing that had always made sense to me. Then about eight years in, I started painting. It was rough. I hated my work. But slowly, and I mean slowly, something started to happen.

The art that came out of me was full of bones and flowers, insects and grief, bodies transforming into something strange and soft and alive. It was therapeutic before it was anything else. A way of processing pain, identity, longing, the complicated beautiful mess of being me. My piece Althea was the moment I realized I had found my language again, a ribcage full of foxglove and poppies and fungi, about hurt and healing and the stubborn persistence of hope.

When I moved and lost my studio space I discovered Procreate, and digital art became a new kind of freedom. Some people still don't realize my pieces are digital, they think they're scanned watercolors. I take that as the highest compliment.

SerenTheory grew out of all of it. The art and the jewelry both live in the same contradiction I have always lived in: bright and dark, silly and morbid, tender and feral. Resin teeth nestled in dried flowers. Real bone molds cast in glitter and color. Googly eyes on delicate filigree. Skeletons who love fiercely. Bodies that become moths and mantises and something beautifully unnameable.

At markets I keep a little warning on one of my portfolios because sometimes people stop, put their hand to their chest, and have to take a moment. That's not something I set out to do. But it turns out there are so many of us out there carrying the same ache, the same strangeness, the same longing to be seen in all our contradictions.

I also bring the Goblin Gacha to my markets, a little vending machine filled with blind bags of current and discontinued jewelry. When you get your prize it tells you: it chooses you. Each bag comes with a goblin proverb. I believe some things find their way to the right person. The art works the same way.

Me, at my birthday, being very normal about a smore.

That's what this is for. The ones who feel feral but also tender. The ones who never quite belonged anywhere. The ones who are still figuring out what they're becoming.

You'll know the ones that are yours.