My name is Kaia Lane. I’m 19 years old, a Pacific Northwest native, a novice writer, a stubborn reader, and an East Asian Studies major (and possibly an aspiring Art History or Anthropology major). For a lot of my life, I have been interested in East Asia. As a child, I began to watch anime, read manga, and visit any museum that had an Asian art or history section in it. It wasn’t until I did a three-week homestay in  Japan and South Korea that I decided what I should study at university. I became fascinated with Korean culture and began to try to learn the language and learn about the culture. I hope to study abroad in Korea for about a year, become fluent in Korean, and work and live in Korea (hopefully in a museum or art gallery)..

The main reason why I am interested in Korea is that I never got to learn about it while in school. The only things I knew about Korea were North Korea, Korean War, kimchi, k-bbq, and k-pop. My knowledge about Korea was only surface-level. Now, I can talk about the history of Korean comfort women, Korean linguistics, weird Korean cafes, Korean skincare, the Korean music industry, a lot of different kinds of Korean foods, and some Korean current events with a little more confidence than before.

The reason why I chose the theme of ‘Han’ is that I wanted to increase my knowledge about Korean culture, especially things that not many foreigners may know about. Exploring was both fun, sad, and frustrating; things that are kind of a part of Han, funnily enough. It was fun to explore a new side of Korean culture that I didn’t know about. It was sad because a lot of mediums that express Han are very sad (i.e. Comfort women, the Sewol ferry). And it was frustrating because as a foreigner I don’t quite understand the concept of Han, so trying to find five different mediums that depict the emotion of Han was a little difficult, but by the end of the project, I understand it a little more. Although many people experience the hardships that Han is a part of, I think Korea has a very different way of dealing with it, and it is encapsulated in Han.