Emily Efird 

Class of 2022

Emily is a design student who works primarily with pencil drawings, as well as digital mediums. Emily is heavily inspired by the Japanese Superflat movement, and hopes to find a way to blend it into her own art.  

My work is a visual interpretation of the cultural disconnect that I feel as a third-generation Korean American. I aim to communicate the confusion through a series of drawings surrounding a fictional character, who I refer to as tokki (토끼), the Korean word for rabbit. Throughout my work the rabbit comes to symbolize my Korean identity, and how despite trying to fit in, Tokki is essentially an imposter, as no matter how many masks and hats Tokki wears, they are not truly the same as the rabbit, in the same way that I will never truly fit into Korean culture. By working through rabbit imagery, I hope to better showcase the obvious separation between Tokki and the rabbits, as I worry that the divide will not be as obvious if I were to work exclusively with drawings of people. The rabbits all exclusively wear hanbok, compared to Tokki who only wears Western attire, as I want to showcase how the rabbits are a part of traditional Korean culture and lineage, whereas Tokki is not.

^{Installation View, Copic, Prismacolor, and Gelly Roll on paper, 2020}