An Interview With:
So Yoon Lym
So Yoon Lym
The High-School Art Teacher Exploring Braid Patterns and their Wider Significance.
So Yoon Lym, born in 1967 in Seoul, Korea, is a prominent visual artist known for her innovative approach to painting and her exploration of cultural and personal identity. After spending her early years in Uganda and then moving to Northern New Jersey, Lym pursued her formal art education at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she earned a BFA in Painting, and at Columbia University, where she completed an MFA in Painting in 1991. Her extensive exhibition history includes venues such as the United States Embassy in Djibouti, Centro Provincial de Artes Plásticas y Diseños in Santiago, Cuba, the Coreana Museum in Seoul, and various prominent institutions across the East Coast of the United States.
Lym’s artistic practice is deeply informed by her diverse experiences and cultural background. Her series "The Dreamtime" intricately explores braid patterns and hairstyles, drawing inspiration from everyday observations and personal experiences. This body of work emerged from her time as a high school art teacher and her earlier career as a textile artist, where she initially photographed hairstyles that later influenced her paintings. The series reflects her fascination with patterns and design, inspired by both her time in the urban environment of New Jersey and her broader cultural observations.
The title "The Dreamtime" connects Lym's work to the concept of Aboriginal Australian cosmology, where it represents a mythical era of creation. By using this title, she frames her paintings not merely as depictions of hairstyles but as a dialogue with ancestral and transformative practices. Her choice to use aerial perspectives in her paintings serves to abstract and elevate the braid patterns to a level of universal and timeless significance, echoing natural landscapes and reinforcing the idea that these human-made patterns are deeply interconnected with the natural world.
Lym’s work also addresses the broader themes of personal and cultural expression through hair. She views hair as a medium that transcends individual identity, representing deeper aspects of gender, beauty, and cultural heritage. Her approach challenges the notion of artistic hierarchy, emphasizing a mutual connection between the painter, the subjects of her paintings, and the cultural practices they represent.
901: How did you start and what inspired you to pursue this path as an artist? Do you have any early sources of inspiration?
So Yoon Lym: As an artist, I am always looking and thinking about ideas that could be worked out as a painting. Many of my best ideas for paintings have come from everyday observations. My everyday life between 2001-2009 was my full-time work as a high school art educator at John F. Kennedy High School in Paterson, New Jersey. Before becoming an art educator, I worked as a textile artist in NYC. This painting series is a culmination of my interest in photography, fashion and painting. Initially, I was just taking pictures of interesting hairstyles and braid patterns, without a particular plan that these pictures would one day be used to help me create this painting series. Before this painting series, I had a black and white acrylic on paper road painting series based on photos that I had taken through my many drives in and around New Jersey.
Can you share some memories from your childhood in Uganda and Kenya, and how those experiences have influenced your artistic journey?
My earliest memories of Uganda and Kenya were looking up at the sky and being amazed at the wide-open skies and the natural world. I didn’t grow up with a television for the first 7 years of my life so my life and my time with my family was being out in nature most of the time. The official language of Uganda was English, so English was my first language. My parents tell me that I loved pointing out when I was little how big and blue the sky was.
Your Dreamtime series has garnered significant attention, focusing on braid patterns, hairstyles and intricate geometric patterns. What initially inspired you to explore these themes?
Back in 2001-2009, when I was taking pictures of different hairstyles and cornrow braid patterns, one has to remember that wearing cornrow braids were not mainstream during this period. If you saw cornrow braids, it was predominately in a Black and urban town or city. I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey, about 3 towns over from Paterson where no one wore cornrow braids. But, I also lived in Montclair, NJ between 1976-1979 where I had an integrated classroom. So, I had seen cornrow braids but on elementary school classmates and nothing that I recalled as being particularly memorable. I learned during my time teaching between 2001-2009 at John F. Kennedy High School, that students loved their heroes (usually athletes and performers) and their hero at the time was Allen Iverson. The students wanted to draw and make art of Allen Iverson and I realized that their love for him also came in the form of wearing cornrow braids like him. I love patterns and designs; I mean what artist doesn’t have an interest in pattern and design regardless of your medium or craft form!
I think a lot during the painting process about coming up with the right title. I think titles are important in that they help the artist re-contextualize their work. Rather than present my painting series just as a series of fashion hairstyles, I wanted to present these paintings from the standpoint of the maker and ‘craftsperson’. During the time of “The Dreamtime’ painting series, I was learning about the meaning of ‘The Dreamtime’ in pre-colonial Australia in a Chronicle book called Lardil: Keepers of the Dreamtime. The Lardils were a hunter-gatherer aboriginal people on the Wellesley Islands of Queensland in northern Australia. In this pocket-size book, David McKnight illuminated the core thinking of the Aborigines and their belief in a spiritual, religious and mythical time period where their ancestors appeared as ‘Ancestral Beings’ and transformed the world. Through ritual practice and ceremonies, they were honouring the spirits of these ancestral beings.
I am pretty sure Allen Iverson between 2001-2009 was not wearing cornrow braids because he consciously knew that the Black American slaves used cornrows as secret maps. I believe he wore braids for the pure beauty and artistry of the braids which were showcased so everyone could identify him as he played basketball on a national stage. Iverson was an extraordinary athlete, performer, showman and a shaman who tapped into his ancestral spirits to re-tell the story of his ancestors but from the standpoint of a transformative hairstyle. The work of a craftsman is one of transformation and the braider most certainly transformed Iverson’s appearance. I know that cornrow braids and the fact that braid patterns were used as slave maps is something that has been talked about in social media lately and I have also seen many using my paintings as a backdrop to this storyline. I think paintings can be used to tell other stories. However, that was not the storyline of this painting series or the painting subjects and how they came to be. The students in 2001-2009 were not wearing cornrow braids because they were referencing secret slave maps. Sure, they were wearing cornrow braids because it was a hairstyle of their ancestors. But, more specifically, they wore cornrow braids because of their love of Allen Iverson and other heroes of their time who wore cornrow braids as a style and cultural statement.
I think an artist is also a craftsperson. A cook is also a craftsperson in that they transform ingredients into a particular dish or meal. Every culture throughout time has a reverence for its craft traditions. A painter is very much a craftsperson too. A hairstylist is also a craftsperson. The ancient practices of the craftsperson is as old as time. That practice of ritual and ceremony in this case is realized through cornrow hair designs which are further practiced through another ancient ritual of painting and the re-creation of form.
The aerial perspective in your paintings is unique. What led you to this choice, and how does it impact the viewer’s experience?
When I was initially taking pictures of student hairstyles, I tried to position their heads so that I didn’t take a picture of their faces as I didn’t want to get involved with the legal paperwork of getting parental permission for taking pictures while I was in school working as an art educator. I tried to take pictures during my lunch, prep periods, in between periods and at the end of the day. As I experimented with different head positions, I also explored picture angles that would highlight just the braid patterns without necessarily showing the identity of the wearer. It was the need to not have faces so prominently displayed and featured that also led to this unique angling of the head. I understand that these would be in the genre of the portrait, but because of the unusual angles that focus more on the braids from above and behind, they do become more like landscapes in my opinion.
I think every cornrow wearer, even if they are re-creating an existing pattern, wants to feel that they are the one and only. That is what we all want to do in some way with our existence-to reveal ourselves to be unique and one and only through our style, our creativity, our chosen activities, and our life endeavours. I became Asian when I came to America at the age of 7, where it was of utmost importance to identify me as Asian. For the first seven years of my life, I didn’t know I was supposed to identify myself. No one asked me where I was from when I was in Uganda. It was only once I came to America that I became conscious and aware of America’s obsessive need to identify, classify, and categorize everything and everyone by race.
You’ve drawn parallels between the intricate hair braiding patterns in your paintings and the natural world, likening them to valleys, mountains, and rivers. How do you see the relationship between human-made patterns and natural ones?
Even though I don’t speak, read, or write the Korean language and didn’t grow up in a Korean community, my genetics and my DNA are of Asian ancestry. My name is Korean, without a doubt. When I first moved to America in 1974, when I was 7 years old, I remember people recommending that I adopt an ‘Americanized name’. I never wanted to have another name or change it. I know my first name is difficult to pronounce, and I genuinely did not mind and sincerely understood that not everyone could pronounce, my name, and I never got angry or felt indignant with efforts to pronounce my name. But I bring up my ancestry because perhaps it is also my training as a sumi-e painter, that made me aware that everything is connected to nature. I learned sumi-e painting by studying under Ung No Lee in Normandy, France in the summer of my 16th year. Sumi-e painting is very much an aesthetic and philosophical way of painting and looking and thinking about art’s connection to nature. A sumi-e painter relates the act of painting to nature, regardless of subject matter. Perhaps if I had never learned the philosophy and practice of sumi-e painting, I would never have been able to paint “The Dreamtime”. If I had never worked as a textile artist for 7 years, maybe I would not have developed the skills through practice to be able to paint texture in the way that I worked out through “The Dreamtime’ paintings. We are all the sum total product of everything we have done in our lives to get to the point that we are at, to have an idea, to be able to make that idea a physical reality.
I’ve also read that you have likened your practice to the art of Taekwondo, which is really interesting! Could you explain this further?
I think the practice of artmaking is like being an athlete. It is very much a practice of discipline. There is a lot of training, repetition, and meditation in artmaking. As an art teacher, I hear a lot of complaints from my students about why they have to do this or that assignment, that they will never be artists, they don’t think art is important in their lives, etc. I tell my students that art is really about having a goal, problem solving, overcoming obstacles, and building muscle memory through repetition to build skills. Once you develop that higher-level skill, that is when innovation comes to you and you can pick up on things and ideas that would not be possible without the hours and years of practice, repetition, and training. It is through hours and years of repetition and training that one can achieve higher-level results in art and any sports.
You mentioned that the Dreamtime series is inspired by the intricate craftsmanship of the braiders. How do you view the relationship between the artist (you) and the original creators (the braiders) of these patterns?
I have discovered in the last several years, that there is a sad desire to create a victim narrative, between the painter and the braider, between the subject and the painter. As if one is suppressed and one has taken over by painting the paintings. And that victim narrative is really about creating never-ending conflict through identity politics. I think language is very important. When you refer to the braider as the ‘original creator’, It appears that you are saying that since nature created the landscape, the landscape painter is only re-creating through a painting what is already a creation onto itself. It is like suggesting Canaletto’s paintings are secondary to the ‘original’ architects of the many architectural structures that are at the centre of his landscape paintings. You surely have seen the hundreds of paint and sip paintings of nature that are lifeless in their plastic construction. Why is it that Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Lorrain were able to draw and paint a landscape that resonated throughout time as an experience of ‘nature’? It is because they were skilled artists who were able to tap into the ancestral energies of creation. They were the shamans of their time. I am the shaman artist of my time, tapping into the energies of my time, much as the braider is a shaman who through the act of creation is tapping into the energies of the ancestral land.
In nature, the clouds understand when to filter the sun’s harmful rays, just like our pupils naturally dilate depending on how much light is in the environment. The braider found meaning through their creation as worn by the students; the students found meaning through wearing the braided creations on their hair; and I, as the painter, found meaning through the act of painting. There is no hierarchy in the search for meaning in life or in the making of meaning in our lives. My relationship to the braiders was quite simply a mutual connection to the student who wore the braids. The braider and I were both shamans of our time, weaving, inscribing, making, and creating. And through these acts, we found meaning in our lives.
In your view, what role does hair, as a medium of personal and cultural expression, play in the broader context of your Dreamtime series?
Hair, in its most biological sense, is a signal to our biology. The manipulation and design of hair signal messages of gender, beauty, desirability, status, history, longing, dreams, etc. A friend sent me a wonderful book by Kurt Stein called Hair: A Human History, which I have been reading and trying to absorb in parts as there are so many interesting facets to hair throughout history and throughout different cultures to learn. Hair as it relates to aging, to the history of the African American barbershops that were a uniquely American institution, to styling, colouring, falling out, straight hair, curly hair, loss of hair, desire of hair, artmaking with hair, etc.
Cornrow braids undoubtedly originated with African and Black hair. In the same way, break dancing originated with the urban youth of the Bronx in the 1970s. It is important to recognize the facts. Origins are important, but for anything to grow and flourish, it can’t stay contained within the confines of its origin. How amazing is it that there is a break dancing sports category in the 2024 Olympics? And how interesting and exciting is it that so many break-dancers represent so many different countries and ethnic and cultural backgrounds? There will be continued growth and interest in any art-form. Long after we are all gone, there will be new shamans of the time to progress the story of the cornrow braid. And they will learn the history of what cornrows meant at different times. For any art-form to continue and flourish, new shamans with new visions will re-tell the story of the ancestral past. I played a small
part in telling the story of cornrow braids as an art-form through a painting series.
As we wrap up, how do you hope your work will be remembered or perceived in the years to come?
‘The Dreamtime’ paintings represent a moment in time in an urban high school in America in the early 2000’s when cornrow braids were worn by teenage students who were tapping into the energies of their heroes and the ancestral beings of the land.
With 'The Dreamtime' painting series, I had hoped to create a beautiful and memorable painting series to share with the world. I want the best for my students, and in representing their braid patterns, I worked hard to be faithful to their representation.