I live by a railway, and one of the regular routes for my walks is to cross the railway and to walk towards in the direction of the cultural center. In the early days, I became extremely interested in nighttime light and shadows, which became inspiration for my sketches and paintings. There was also a time when I focused greatly on the image of tightrope walking in my sketches because I felt that for those like me, there were two sources of life-threatening danger: one was the complications caused by high blood sugar, while the other was the imminent lethal threat caused by low blood sugar.
Because my father worked as the Principle of a juvenile reform school, I was able to come and go freely at the reform school. As a result, I was impressed by the images of shaved heads, uniforms, roll calls, drills, war songs, and iron bars. I was never really happy in school, and the academic pressure as well as my illness made me feel confined or imprisoned, like I would never be liberated. My blood tests and injections were all performed in secrecy, and only my homeroom teacher and my military training instructor knew I was diabetic because I wanted to keep my illness private.
Of course, self-isolation was a protective shell for me, or made me realized the problem I was facing. Yet at the same time, I lived in anxiety and under stress every minute of the day. When I left home to go to college, the circumstances I was under forced me to make changes, since I had to depend on myself for everything. There was no one there to help me when I suffered from low blood sugar, and this forced me to think seriously about freeing myself from previous self-imprisonment. However, my sense of inferiority or my worries about whether my peers would accept me or not made me hesitate for quite a while. During this period, I started
working on the Imprisonment Series. Gradually, I wanted to escape from the prison which was either protecting me or trapping me. For those reasons, I had to come to terms with my past failures or inner demons. I kept thinking about this when I painted and finally made up my mind. Finally, I made public my illness in my freshman year and stopped caring about what or how people thought of me.
