Before We Are Defined《정의되기 전에》
A new life lies in the crib, reaching out with its hands and feet to explore a world it has yet to know. To me, the baby represents a person who has not yet been fully defined by the world—someone who has not yet chosen a profession, proven their abilities, or become the “successful person” in anyone else’s eyes.
The golden frame surrounding the baby’s body represents my understanding of the value of life. It symbolizes my belief that, before life even begins, God already sees the uniqueness and irreplaceable value of each person. Here, “uniqueness” does not mean a predetermined résumé or career path. Rather, it is an identity that a person gradually discovers and lives out through growth, exploration, and response.
Yet on the plants surrounding the crib, I have drawn pairs of eyes looking toward the baby.
These eyes may belong to parents, teachers, or peers. They may also represent cultural expectations, educational systems, or society’s ideas of success. They may express anticipation, observation, hope, or anxiety. They are not necessarily malicious. Parents may want their children to succeed because they love them; they may hope that their children choose a stable career because they fear that their children might suffer in the future.
For this reason, I am less interested in the opposition between “good” and “bad” ways of seeing than in a more difficult question:
When love, expectations, fear, and values enter a person’s life, are they accompanying that person as they grow, or are they deciding who that person should become?
Different cultures may offer different answers. Some people are expected to become successful; others are expected to become stable and competitive; still others are encouraged to become unique and distinctly themselves. Yet regardless of how these answers differ, those “eyes” seem to be asking the same question:
Who should you become?
And the baby has not yet answered.
In the lower left corner, the young leaves also carry white spots, but I have deliberately left out the pupils. This does not mean that they are incapable of seeing. Rather, they remain in a state in which their way of seeing has not yet been fixed. I want them to retain a sense of self-recognition that is still incomplete.
Beside them, plants transform into totems, lifted gently by the wind as they move toward the baby. The wind does not tell the child what to become. It simply enters into a relationship with the child, accompanying them as they grow.
This led me to reconsider the meaning of “safety.”
A crib is originally a space meant to shelter and protect life. Yet when it is surrounded by eyes constantly watching the child, that shelter can also become a space of observation and expectation. Perhaps true safety is not simply “no one hurts me,” but also:
“No one decides who I am for me.”
This work is therefore not about asking children to escape society, nor is it about rejecting every voice that comes from others. Human beings become themselves through relationships, culture, language, and history. What concerns me more is discernment—learning, among all the voices surrounding us, which ones are worth listening to, which expectations can become nourishment for our lives, and which ones do not need to become our definition.
This, to me, is also a deeper form of trust: not knowing who you will ultimately become, yet being willing to walk with you through the process of becoming yourself.
This relationship of accompanying rather than defining is also one of the central ideas within this work.
Ultimately, I do not want to offer an answer about education. I want to leave behind a question:
Whose voice are we listening to?
Perhaps the value of a life does not need to wait for success, achievement, academic qualifications, profession, or social status to appear before it becomes valid.
Value precedes achievement.
