Sumin 수민 Kim

Through whimsical art, I expand access to information on social injustice, boosting dialogue around the subject matter to promote community healing. My preferred art medium is character and toy design, using both traditional and digital art materials. These include ceramics, drawing, painting, digital painting, 3D digital sculpture, and virtual reality.

For this MAATC exhibition, Welcome to the World of Microaggression Givers: Where Social Justice Has Been Achieved is an art-based autoethnographic virtual reality installation that is based on my research regarding everyday racism instances and their impacts on mental health.

This project took three years to research alongside navigating grad school. In this time, I have developed new skills of digitally sculpting designed characters as well as virtual reality (VR) spaces. I chose VR as a medium for this project to create what I see in this world and promote empathy and validation among viewers. VR is the ideal medium for this project since it can invite users into a new world. By placing the viewer in the first-person perspective, users can indirectly experience the person living in the virtual world.

My hope for this project is, having viewers in my space to “see” and “feel” what it is like to be living in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic as an international Asian student. This project is rooted in my own definition of social justice — social justice is forming a community that constantly processes, addresses, and discusses social problems together, and includes everyone in the conversation.