ABOUT
The Newcomer is a multimedia art project created as Eun-Kyoung Annette Cho’s Lincoln Center Fellowship capstone, anchored by an animated short film and expanded through interactive digital work and a public workshop.
The project was presented at Lincoln Center’s In:formation Festival during Summer for the City and, with support from the Asian American Arts Alliance (A4), was showcased at Queens Botanical Garden in Flushing, NYC.
The documentary Hybridity Mukbang, an extension of The Newcomer, received support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Support for Artists Fund, sponsored by Third World Newsreel.
DIRECTOR's STATEMENT
Living in South Korea for almost my entire life and then moving to the U.S. has been a constant battle, not only with misunderstandings rooted in subtle cultural differences, but also with a deep sense of cultural inferiority shaped by the pervasive influence of global Western supremacy. Korea’s admiration for the West often intensified my feelings of shame, for example, when listening to K-pop lyrics filled with misspelled or awkward English that seemed to reflect an eagerness to emulate a Western culture perceived as superior.
The Newcomer traces my immigration to the U.S. and my process of confronting and overcoming this internalized shame. While traditional elements of Korean identity initially felt erased by modernization and Westernization, I eventually came to understand that these “modernized” expressions were not merely imitations of the West, but uniquely Korean in their own right. This realization allowed me to reclaim a sense of cultural pride, reframing hybridity not as a loss, but as a resilience.
OUR PROUD AAPI TEAM
EUN-KYOUNG
ANNETTE CHO
Producer · Director · Illustrator · Animator · Editor
for all projects
HAERRI KIM
Graphic Designer
for workshop
and marketing materials
(website title and background
designed by Kim)