Although the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, for Susan Sponsler, the lines between her birthplace in Seoul, Korea and the place she grew up in Iowa are anything but straight. They are sometimes jagged, sometimes blurry and often broken. In UNCOMMON TRAITS: RE/LOCATING ASIA, Sponsler presents her photographic work, which explores issues concerning her adoption as a Korean baby into the white world of southern Iowa. While a common creative reaction to adoption, especially cross-cultural, might be anger at the sense of loss and confusion, at the core of Sponsler's work is a touching nostalgia that speaks loudly of her creative intent: It is not so much to dwell on the adoption and subsequent cultural confusion, but to explore the involved issues and images through the mixing of cultural fantasies and realities. Sponsler maintains, throughout the work, her role as the proud daughter of caucasian parents who created and sustained a loving family in which she was raised. "This work is about assumptions," Sponsler says, speaking of the trouble she's had when encountering others who are quick to suggest that she is different -- that she should have different tastes, viewpoints and traditions than they. But she was raised with all the trappings of American culture, and in this age of multicultural awareness, her interactions with people who assume she knows Asian culture and language can lead to a "web of contradiction and confusion regarding identity," according to Sponsler. The imagistic blending in Sponsler's photography lends itself well to the exploration of cultural ?faces? and the development of new perspectives ? presenting the portrait of a family wherein the children do not look like spitting images of the parents, and the baby portrait of a girl whose cultural identity will not map itself as clearly as the topographical lines on the maps of her two ?home? countries as seen in her Untitled Diptych. In motherless/mothered, Sponsler situates her own baby picture a the center of a cross of photos, with her adoptive mother on one arm, and images of Asian fantasy on the other. The accompanying text reads, "Perhaps the truth is that alone, neither one can be my real mother; they are two halves of one mother. One who gave me life and made me motherless and one who gave me love and mothered me." Sponsler said she has always been immensely curious -- not about what her birth mother acted or spoke like, but about what she looked like. In a culture that places heavy emphasis on identifying cosmetically with one's parents, it is understandable to see that her dislocation from her birth mother and Korean culture would manifest itself in a very American way. And that dislocation creates a gap, a loss: The culture of Korea and the "reality" behind the fantasy images perpetrated by various media and used by Sponsler in this piece (as well as others) is what she has lost. A woman whose face bespeaks even to strangers a culture she has never learned, Sponsler, most of all, feels that she has something, but does not quite know what. Assumed Identity, the name of Sponsler's exhibit and of one of her pieces, suggests the identity others assume for her, by identifying her Asian heritage in her appearance. But the word play also brings to mind the identity she has assumed under her own particular cultural conditions. And that, finally, is what makes this work fascinating: It is a quiet, personal look into someone with not one, but two baby bracelets, and the attempt to find what has been lost in translation between the two.   --Jennifer Graves   Jennifer Graves is a writer and editor in North Texas.