"This all started in the late 50s after the Korean War," filmmaker and South Korean adoptee Glenn Morey says about "Side By Side," an immersive audio-visual installation he created with wife, Julie. "There were many mixed-race Korean children who were the offspring of... American GIs. Those children needed a social solution, essentially, and were purged from that country via inter-country adoption," he told WNYC's cultural critic Rebecca Carroll. Glenn's own experience as one such child sparked his curiosity to explore his background, and it ultimately serves as catalyst for the project, which features the stories of 100 South Korean adult adoptees living in seven different countries worldwide. 

Julie, who is white and not an adoptee, said working with her husband on the project taught her about the internalized loss so many adoptees feel well into their adulthood.

"This was a completely revelatory experience for me in terms of the notion of identity," she said. " I don't have to deal with that, but I needed to learn to understand it and try to have a sense of for what so so terribly important not only to the adoptees we interviewed, but certainly to my husband and partner." 

Carroll, who is also an adoptee engaged in writing a memoir about that experience, asked Glenn how he thought the shared perspectives of individual adoptees can change the narrative around adoption in general.

"There are many adoptees out there who perhaps have not been exposed to the stories of others and they might consider that they are the only one out there," he said. "In the 100 interviews we did, the most commonly used phrase of all was, 'I was the only one.'"   

"Adoptees of color need to be seen," said Carroll. "We are the children of our adopted families, but we are also the children of the countries and cultures we come from."

Side By Side opens Thursday, September 5 at the Waterfall Gallery in New York. It runs through October 6.