Reckoning on the myths and realities of the immigration experience, America Fever imagines scenes where the romance of the American West collides with the lived experiences of Korean American immigrants in the 1970s. Fantasies that drew Koreans across the Pacific – visions shaped by Hollywood Westerns, muscle cars, neon lights, and the promise of prosperity – are refracted through a distinctly Korean lens, where tradition is not only remnants of a past life but both the weight and reminder that carries forward into a new world.

In these images, the American West is not just a place but an idea – one that echoes through the figures of young Asian bodies draped in modernized hanbok, tossing lassos, or straddling motorcycles under an expansive sky. A young woman, like Botticelli’s Venus, emerges from the national flower of Korea, the mugunghwa, an emblem of endurance blooming amid unfamiliar terrain, while a young couple stands against a hwatu backdrop, underscoring the stakes of reinvention. This new life, like a bet placed, is fraught with risk and possibility. The landscape itself, vast and indifferent, mirrors the precarious tightrope of migration, where survival is a performance and there is little room for misstep.

America Fever is not merely about displacement; it is also about belonging. While the topic of Korean American immigration has been vastly explored through art, the focus has been on either the weight of history, the struggles of expat life, or the dream of assimilation – treating these experiences as separate rather than inextricably bound. Hahn’s work suggests that the immigrant story is never just one of departure or arrival, loss, or aspiration, but always an entanglement of all. For Hahn, to immigrate is to reimagine oneself, to script a new myth while always remembering the one left behind. As the neon signage spelling out the Korean word for “dream” glows in resonation with generations who came seeking something beyond their postwar realities, the sentiment of America Fever simultaneously seduces and disillusions, evoking a sense of camaraderie and unspoken understanding.

Emanuel Hahn is a Los Angeles based artist and director working in photography and film. As a Korean Third Culture Kid who grew up in Singapore and Cambodia, he developed an interest in storytelling, especially on topics of identity, culture, and diaspora. Questioning what it means to belong, his works shed light on untold stories of immigrants and workers. With his deep observational and listening abilities, Hahn has told the stories of coffee farmers in Colombia, Chinese grocery store owners in the Mississippi Delta, Korean Uzbeks in Brooklyn, and small business owners in Koreatown. His work has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Atlantic, The Guardian, among others.

All works are available for purchase. For inquires, please email us at hello@gobi.la

Photographs from opening party by Paulsta