Assumed Identity consists of mixed media and photo-based images exploring autobiographic issues related to my adoption from Korea by my American caucasian parents and the relationship between my cross-cultural adoption and my experience as an Asian American citizen. Family photographs document the love and attention I have received throughout my life. The notions of homeland and national identity addressed in UNCOMMON TRAITS: RE/LOCATING ASIA are important themes for me. Like Asian Americans born in the United States, Asian American adoptees like me experience almost total immersion in American culture. But in a multi-cultural society increasingly concerned with developing pride in one's ethnic heritage, cross-cultural adoptees broken link to their past culture via ancestry and tradition sometimes creates a web of contradiction and confusion regarding identity. The Korean and American flags used in All American Girl II represent my conflicting feelings in perceived societal pressures to reconnect ties to the country of my birth and to my birth mother and the frustration of being assumed a recent immigrant based on my ethnic heritage. My identity does not fit the one which others have created for me, based on false assumptions. With this artwork, the identity which I assume for myself becomes fluid and limitless.   -Susan Sponsler   Susan Sponsler is an artist whose mixed media and photo-based images explore autobiographic issues related to her cross-cultural adoption from Korea by her American parents and her experience as an Asian American. Her work has been exhibited nationally, and she was a fellow in the 1995 New York University American Photography Institute's National Graduate Seminar. She received her MFA degree in photography from Texas Woman's University in Denton, TX, where she currently is employed as the assistant director of publications.