Maria Ah Hyun Stracke
Visual Artist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
ABOUT
Maria Ah Hyun Stracke was born in Busan, South Korea, grew up in Minnesota, resided for many years in New York City, and is now living in Philadelphia. She has a Ph.D. in Literature from The Graduate Center (City University of New York) and is currently earning an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture (Temple University). Maria’s practice gleans inspiration from both the natural areas where she grew up as well as the urban environments where she now lives and works as an artist and educator.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My drawing, painting and mixed media works use Western traditions of landscape and portraiture to disrupt conventional constructions of identity, home, place and family. Much of my work mourns and reimagines forebears and ancestral ties, indirectly reflecting on my loss of family and culture as a transracial adoptee from Korea. My recent work critiques the generic nature of images captured by U.S. military photographers in Korea during the Korean War, with a focus on their stereotypical characterizations of Asian femininity and the racialized gendering of "foreign" landscapes. By reconfiguring traditional materials such as ink, graphite and hanji (paper) as well as archival photographic sources, my practice investigates the complexities of racial formation and the production of space in the U.S./Korean context.
Website: mariastracke.com
Instagram: @mariahhyun