Eugene La Rochelle
Eugene La Rochelle was born in Fulda, West Germany in 1987. As the son of an American soldier, he spent his formative years traveling between military installations. Through military culture, he examined and learned the effects of US military colonialism and its effects on the surrounding country. This experience has directly informed his work on miscegenation and identity. After graduating with a Master’s degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2013, he has been focusing on identity politics in South Korea and how American foreign policy has directly affected the treatment of mixed-race Koreans today.
“Where are you REALLY from?” – a question dreaded by multiracial Americans like myself – is many mixed children’s initiation into a lifetime of navigating their identity, planting a seed of awakening that how they perceive themselves is often at a great disconnect from how they are perceived by others. But how is one to navigate racial identity if claims of ownership and belonging can be denied from multiple perspectives in parallel? As much as my claims to an American identity have been approached with suspicion by those who consider it inexorably linked to whiteness, my claims to an Asian identity have simultaneously been interrogated by others who link “Asian-ness” to an idea of racial purity. My work exists at the intersection of two races, trapping me in an uncomfortable liminal space providing access to both, but entry to neither. I explore the themes of Racial Impostor Syndrome, and the resulting isolating effect of being repeatedly Otherized, whether in the States, or in my mother’s homeland of Korea. My pieces contemplate the struggle to self-define my identity in a world where those definitions are imposed on me without my consultation, negotiation, or involvement. And yet, amidst the sharp yearning to find escape from the shackles and confinement of Otherness, my work finds a glimmer of hope in the possibility that my fellow mixed-race travelers on this ceaseless, tiresome journey of identity-navigating may confer membership to a special family of our own.”
——— Eugene La Rochelle