I have long been fascinated by the question of what a person is ultimately made of. In 2026, while watching the Korean drama Our Unwritten Seoul, I was deeply moved by the way it portrayed creativity, struggle, social expectations, and the search for self-worth. I did not create this work because of celebrity admiration, but because I was drawn to the emotional tension created collectively by the screenwriter, director, and actors. The way a character can reveal different versions of herself within a brief moment, shaped by memory, environment, and relationships, became an opportunity for me to look at the idea of “the human” once again.
One line from the drama—“A person is not simply a person, but a collective, a collection of many emotions”—also led me to look back at nearly twenty years of my own sketches. I have drawn the fleeting movements of a musician’s arm while performing, the changing gestures of my father sitting on a sofa, and, at times, recombined people I encountered at different moments on the street to create a single “person.” Looking back, I realize that perhaps I have never really been drawing a complete person. Instead, I have been capturing the fragments that a life leaves behind at different moments in time.
For this reason, I superimposed different moments of the character’s gaze within a single image. They may represent a form of protection developed through hurt, or a protective camouflage created in order to adapt to the surrounding environment. No single state can fully represent her. Rather, it is the coexistence of these different selves that constitutes who she is.
This work is also a gentle dialogue between myself as a Taiwanese artist and Korean society. I do not wish to judge which form of education or which set of social values is better. Instead, through this work, I want to ask: When we have all heard the expectations coming from family, education, and society, how do we gradually become the people we are today?
Taiwan and Korea may have different cultural and educational experiences, yet it is precisely between these similarities and differences that I see the possibility of understanding one another.
