Traditional art is by nature a study in boundary. With a painting or sculpture, the viewer is removed from the object, and it is the space between subject and object wherein the discourse of viewership occurs.

The theme of boundary is at the heart of "Traces and Trajectories: Current Works by Ten Korean-American Artists," an exhibition at the Academy Art Center at Linekona. Through the boundaries and intersections of a combined heritage, the artists explore their cultural experiences.

Kloe Sookhee Kang's works use common household items to create layered compositions. In her video "Oblivion: Bird of Paradise," Kang transforms a domestic interior into a jungle of skyscrapers and back, utilizing charcoal drawn and erased to compile each frame. This video style has been well-utilized by the South African artist William Kentridge among others, and results in a muted image with vestiges of previous frames lingering upon screen. Kang's video follows the titular bird of paradise on its flight across the video's multiple environments. The question remains if the "paradise" is the domestic interior, the transformed cityscape, or perhaps the unknown exterior beyond the window.

Jinchul Kim also explores themes of interiority and exteriority, but with very different subjects. Using almost photorealist style, he paints solitary women upon an indeterminate ground. In "Semantic Occurrence," a young woman stands with head turned, looking at a group of nine pink dots along a gray wall. The dots form some sort of unknowable braille, or perhaps a national flag with accompanying stripes of shadow. The painting's so-called semantic occurrence may have been one of comprehension between the woman and wall, but we are excluded from understanding. The woman is evasive: she looks away with an unrevealing exterior even as the formal elements of her painted body begin to break away with inspection of the fine, multicolored brushstrokes used by the artist.

Jinja Kim's immaculate installation uses vibrant strips of paper to create a pastiche upon 10 small house forms in "Bojagi Town." As the title suggests, the paper collage takes the form of a bojagi, a traditional Korean wrapping made from scraps of fabric sewn together. By covering the houses in bojagi-style paper applique, the theme of domesticity is inverted: The quilting that might have once occurred within a domestic setting has instead become the exterior covering a hidden interior. For Jinja Kim, like Kloe Sookhee Kang and Jinchul Kim, the boundaries of interiority and exteriority are explored by providing or concealing varying levels of information from the viewer.