Before we spoke about the exhibition, we spoke about where we come from.
Not in the way that fits neatly into a press interview, but in fragments: memories of movement, of growing up shaped by both military life and Korean inheritance. As a fellow military brat and multiracial Korean American, I recognized the shorthand immediately.
There are things you learn when you grow up moving between Army bases, countries, and cultural registers. You learn how to read a room before you learn how to name it. You learn how to locate safety without assuming it will last. You learn that belonging is often provisional, and that care is something practiced, not promised.
Those early lessons quietly structure visual artist Samantha Yun Wall’s work. Working primarily in large-scale drawings on Claybord or Duralar, Wall builds her figures through layered applications of ink, conté crayon, carbon, and graphite, often using stencils repeatedly to create velvety, light-absorbing blacks. The surfaces feel almost epidermal: dense, luminous, and tactile. The materials mold faces and eyes to emerge slowly from darkness, rather than appear fully formed.
Long before the figures appear, before the gaze meets yours on the second floor of the Seattle Art Museum, the exhibition is already operating with a diasporic logic: layered rather than linear, attentive to thresholds, resistant to resolution. It reflects a life shaped not by a single origin story, but by movement, inheritance, and adaptation.
For those of us raised within multiracial Korean military diasporas, home was often temporary, language is still uneven, and traditions are selectively carried forward. Storytelling becomes a form of continuity. Not everything survives migration intact. Rituals fracture. Grief loses its scaffolding. What remains is often gesture, repetition, and care encoded in the body.
That understanding shapes how Wall approaches the human figure as a site of accumulated time. Her figures feel lived-in, rather than posed. They hold presence without demanding legibility. They reflect a sensibility attuned to watching, waiting, and sensing before acting.
In our conversation in January before the exhibition opening, Wall reflected on how a childhood shaped by movement, dislocation, and hybrid cultural inheritance continues to inform how she understands the human figure.
“Being of multiple worlds means we don’t have clearly defined boundaries,” she said. “It allows us to shapeshift; to take on the form that’s most compatible with wherever we are.”
That shapeshifting, she noted, once felt destabilizing. “At some point in my life, I thought that was something negative,” she admitted. “It does make identity-building more challenging.”
But over time, that perception shifted: “Once you’ve figured out who you are, it becomes a special power.”
That power is not theatrical. It is quiet, adaptive, and deeply embodied; qualities that resonate strongly within Korean diasporic and military family contexts, where children often learn to observe before asserting, to translate before speaking, to absorb shock rather than deflect it.
For those of us raised with fragmented access to Korean ritual and language, storytelling often becomes a substitute infrastructure; a way of holding continuity when formal ceremony is interrupted by migration.
“We didn’t just leave a place,” Wall reflected. “We also left traditions and rituals that support us in moments of intense emotion.”
That absence of ritual, of culturally-grounded frameworks for grief and care, is not abstract. It lives in the body. It shapes how memory is carried, how loss is metabolized, how attention is distributed.
Wall reflected on how mythology and folklore entered her practice, serving as an organizing structure for her life experiences. “Narrative is powerful, especially when it’s absorbed young,” Wall said. “It shapes how we understand who we are and how we connect to place and to each other.”
“I think mythology and folklore helped me bridge parts of myself that felt separate,” Wall continued. “It created a place where my past and present could meet, instead of feeling so disparate.”
This logic is layered, nonlinear, attentive to thresholds, resistant to closure and becomes understandable the moment you encounter the exhibition itself.
Wall spoke about her Korean mother living on the East Coast, about the growing ache of distance, about the sacrifices that shaped her life and her work. “That drive my mother instilled in me also kept me from spending time with her,” she reflected. “And lately, that feeling of longing has been growing.”
For many in diasporic communities, inheritance arrives unevenly. We inherit ambition alongside absence. Opportunity alongside disruption.
Rather than seeking belonging in dominant narratives, Wall turned toward Korean folklore as methodology, an organizing structure through which fragmented inheritance takes shape. It allowed past and present to coexist inclusively and responsibly, expanding origin into something layered and accountable to complexity.
That context matters when you arrive at the exhibition.
When I attended the opening, visitors gathered quietly on the second floor of SAM; members, artists, families, first-time viewers, hovering at the threshold before entering the space where the press, SAM staff, and the artist gathered. People lingered longer than usual. There was no rush to document, no immediate chatter. Just waiting.
It felt instinctive.
It is the moment before translation. Before recognition. Before the body remembers something the mind has not yet named. Full of quiet, intimate inspiration.
Wall’s work honors that moment. It does not demand immediacy.
The figures unfold slowly. They are layered, chaptered, resistant to summary. Faces emerge and recede. Hair unfurls into tendrils that feel botanical, anatomical, ancestral. Eyes meet yours directly, holding ground.
“When I start working, I always build that way,” Wall said. “There’s something about eye contact, it transmits emotion without explanation.”
That insistence is central to the exhibition. Even when reduced to a single eye, the figures refuse passivity.
Curator Catharina Manchanda articulates this power clearly: “When the figures are life-size or larger, they resist objectification. When they gaze back, they assert agency, even if it’s just an eye.”
This mutual gaze transforms the viewer’s role. You are not positioned above the work. You are enmeshed.
Look closely, and the work begins to bloom.
Threaded through hair, around the gaze and gesture, are Pasque Flowers; sometimes referred to as the “granny flower” in Korean folklore. The flower appears both symbolically and structurally, unfolding in tendrils of hair, in tassel-like forms that suggest offering, in halos that pulse like quiet rhythms around watchful eyes.
The Pasque Flower blooms early, often pushing through cold ground. It carries associations of endurance, grief, and care. Considered toxic in parts of the West, Pulsatilla koreana in Korea is a medicinal perennial, used historically as an anti-inflammatory and antiparasitic plant. In Wall’s work, it functions as lineage: something resilient, complex, and alive.
“The story was deceptively simple,” Wall said of the folklore that anchors this body of work. “But there were so many places where I felt my own life filled it in.”
As someone raised by a Korean immigrant mother who carried histories she didn’t always speak aloud, this observation of Wall’s brought forth deeply contradictory and protective emotional depths for me. Inheritance does not always arrive as a narrative. Sometimes it arrives as form, in art and prose.
At the heart of the exhibition is 삼신 할머니 Samsin Halmeoni, or Grandmother Samsin, a Korean folkloric figure who governs childbirth and fate, blooming children like flowers from the Seocheon Garden of the afterlife.
Samsin Halmeoni is woven into the body of these works as if summoned by quiet Korean Muist, shamanic prayers.
“My connection to Korea is through my mother,” Wall reflected. “As she gets older, I think about what it means to lose not just her, but that connection—to a place, a culture, a version of myself.”
Here, mythology becomes a living framework. Samsin Halmonei is present in care, in scale. She is not sentimental. She is watchful. She is supportive.
Curator Manchanda notes that the exhibition moves through time nonlinearly.: “The works don’t progress in a straight line. They circle. They return. They allow presence and absence to exist together.”
This is particularly resonant for diasporic audiences, many of whom were raised without continuous ritual or ceremony. Samsin manifests an active method for navigating loss, care, and becoming.
As we moved through the exhibition, I kept thinking about that first conversation—the exhaustion, the tenderness, the refusal to over-explain. The work does not separate itself from that reality. It emerges from it.
Wall describes living between worlds as a kind of shapeshifting. “It can make identity harder to build,” she said. “But once you understand who you are, it becomes a power.”
Watching visitors stand quietly on the second floor waiting patiently, absorbing the art and the artist’s words, and not rushing, manifests that power made visible. What You Leave Behind is gathering around something unresolved, ancestral, and still unfolding.
Like the Pasque Flower itself, the work blooms not in ideal conditions, but through persistence.
