I began drawing before I began writing. Both, I have since understood, are the same act: the attempt to locate oneself on a map that is unfamiliar and ever so changing.

My essays practice supil—a Korean literary form that moves not toward resolution but toward yeobaek, the spaciousness of the unsaid. I do not write to persuade or perform. I write to accompany—the reader, and myself—through the ordinary, oftentimes mundane moments where meaning emerges only when deliberately delved and found. The humor that surfaces in my work is haehak: not satire, not irony, but the gentle resilience that stares at things without flinching and without dramatizing—a kind of smile I choose to wear.

My visual work operates in the same register, especially croquis. I am interested in the body as a site of encounter—The Passing You, The Watching Me—across time and space. The figures capture minutes of life—because every moment of life is life—which I later shape into a form suited for dialogue with the viewer.

The faces are left blank. Not as erasure, but as invitation—without a face to fix the figure to one particular story—mine—it becomes anyone's. Perhaps yours.

The fragmented body and the patterns that recur—fractured lines crossing, tracing, dots and irregular dripping lines—are not ornament. They are different times, perhaps different stages of life: the way life moves, never in one straight line, but circles back, layers, and repeats itself in new configurations until repetition becomes its own kind of history. And within that layering, certain colors refuse to behave—a flash of fluorescent yellow, orange, green, blue, or pink breaking through otherwise muted or overpowering themed spaces. That is the self that does not go out, however dimmed or spotlighted the surrounding circumstance.

My two languages, English and Korean, work the same way. I do not think in English, then translate into Korean—or the reverse. A thought arrives already split, and it becomes clearest only when I let both complete each other, untranslated. This is not a failure of either language. It is where the meaning actually lives—in the seam, not on either side of it.

I grew up in Iraq, between languages and borders, explaining Korea as "a small country between China and Japan." That early experience of being outside the expected categories became, eventually, the condition I work from rather than against. Estrangement, I have learned, is not a problem to be solved. It is a method—the very thing that keeps life not merely inevitable, but irresistible.

I have said before that I am many things, and that I am a person of the threshold—경계인. I am most at home belonging fully to none of them: someone in whom one language leads while the other keeps humming beneath it, never fully off—and who trusts neither alone to finish the telling. Perhaps several things can be true of one life without needing to resolve into one.

Writings are made complete in the hands of readers—글은 독자에게 가서 완성된다. I believe the same is true of visual art. It is made complete in the eyes of the viewer.

Byulbon—my publishing imprint—extends this practice into collaborative form: creating space for narrative that does not follow someone else's yellow brick road.