Julia Kim Smith's Transit arrives at a moment when the language of displacement has become uncomfortably familiar. Smith, the daughter of Korean refugees who immigrated to the United States after the Korean War, assembles fifteen years of work spanning video, text, embroidery, and blood into a reckoning that refuses the comfort of metaphor. These pieces insist on the material reality of bodies that carry history, bodies that get reduced to caricature on restaurant receipts, bodies that must perform citizenship as proof of belonging.

The exhibition opens with Cathy Park Hong's words rendered in concrete: "NEXT IN LINE TO BE WHITE/NEXT IN LINE TO DISAPPEAR." Cast concrete letters spell out a meditation on Asian American invisibility, on the particular violence of being told you're a model minority one moment and asked "where are you really from?" the next. Elsewhere, Smith turns documentation into an artifact. The Receipts series presents restaurant bills where servers casually deployed racial slurs, printed on rice paper and hung like scrolls. They occupy the space between evidence and elegy, the paper trail of casual racism folded into everyday transactions. Using menstrual blood on Kotex pads in The Daily Pad series, Smith creates icons of Jesus, Damien Hirst paintings, and Donald Trump's hair, collapsing the sacred and profane while reminding us that women's labor, particularly women of color's labor, gets rendered invisible even as it's everywhere. Selfie Mirror, with its etched surface and American flag pin, turns self-documentation into something more complicated, offering no clean reflection, only the trace of looking, the evidence of trying to locate yourself in a nation that treats you as a perpetual foreigner.

Smith describes herself as "a small, angry, and sometimes funny Asian American woman." That "sometimes funny" is critical. It's the space where rage transforms into something sharp enough to cut through the noise. Humor here isn't deflection; it's precision. The HELLO I'M A BIRTHRIGHT CITIZEN! patches, available for ten dollars each, function as merch and manifesto, satire, and survival gear. 

Transit refuses easy resolutions. It doesn't offer uplift or catharsis. What it provides instead is witness: to the accumulation of small violences, to the way racism operates through language and gesture, to the costs of existing in a body that's always being read as other.

This is Smith's first solo exhibition, a gathering of work that has traveled across the United States and internationally. At Waller Gallery, these pieces find temporary harbor before continuing their own transit. Smith isn't asking for permission. She's claiming the space, documenting the journey, and daring you not to look away.

Biography
Julia Kim Smith (Baltimore, MD) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work addresses issues of racism, sexism, misrepresentation, and underrepresentation through traditional and new media. The daughter of Korean refugees who immigrated to the United States after the Korean War, she is a small, angry, and sometimes funny Asian American woman. 

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