Munjado, the Korean tradition of ideographic painting, historically rendered Confucian virtues through a codified pictorial language. This series unsettles that inherited certainty, using the ideograph as a structure through which to examine the social self—the negotiation between duty, expectation, and interior life. Traditional emblems give way to a contemporary iconography of diamonds and ouroboros, each carrying inherited symbolic weight into the pressures and contradictions of the present.

The diamond recurs as a central figure: matter transformed under immense pressure until it crystallizes, then turns outward to reflect light. It embodies resilience forged through hardship—the possibility that what is shaped by struggle can become, in turn, a source of strength for others.

The ouroboros carries a more personal dimension. Born in the Year of the Snake, I use the serpent as a recurring reflection of self, its circular form evoking the endless cycles of everyday life—repetition, exhaustion, overcoming, death, renewal. Rather than suggesting escape from these cycles, the ouroboros represents the continual process of being undone and remade within them. Faint traces of shedding appear throughout the paintings like sediment, marking the residue of a self in transformation.

While my Munjado series reflects the self negotiating the demands of everyday life—as a woman, and as an individual shaped by responsibility, expectation, and struggle—my Chaekgeori series turns toward an imagined ideal: the life we aspire to build and the person we hope to become.

Traditional Chaekgeori gave visual form to aspirations for knowledge, cultivation, prosperity, and a well-lived life, through shelves filled with books and treasured objects. I borrow both the structure and its underlying impulse, reimagining the genre through the desires that define contemporary life: success, wealth, comfort, beauty, fulfillment. My shelves hold these objects while quietly questioning how such ideals are constructed, and at what cost they are pursued.

At the center of the series is a tension between aspiration and essence. The works consider what we accumulate, and the images of success we are taught to desire, while asking what remains once those external measures are stripped away. Within these carefully constructed spaces lies the possibility of pursuing an ideal life without losing one's inner center—holding onto what is essential while still reaching toward something beyond it.

The Twelve Zodiac Guardians reflect the many selves we each carry. Rather than treating the animals as fixed symbols of personality or fortune, I imagine them as individual characters—distinct temperaments moving through the same shared conditions of life.

Presented as traditional warrior figures, the guardians embody how we move through the everyday world: as if entering a battlefield, confronting responsibility, uncertainty, conflict, loss, and change one day at a time. Their armor suggests not invulnerability, but the strength we assemble in order to continue.

Together, the twelve animals form a collective portrait of the self. Each meets the world differently—through courage, protection, endurance, vulnerability, renewal, or companionship—and in their differences, they trace the varied ways we survive, adapt, and carry on.

The series begins with the traditional pairing of tiger and magpie—Hojakdo—in which the tiger wards off misfortune and the magpie announces good news. Rather than simply reproducing this pairing, I bring the two figures into the present, asking what protection and fortune might mean within contemporary life.

Diamonds appear alongside the tigers as an extension of the symbolic language developed in my Munjado series. The diamond represents something essential formed through adversity—a crystalline structure produced under immense pressure. Paired with the tiger, it shifts the idea of strength away from dominance and toward resilience: the inner value that emerges through endurance.

The tiger also carries a more personal attraction. I am drawn to its quiet strength and independence—to an animal that does not depend upon the security of a group. At the same time, it can feel strangely human: vulnerable yet formidable, moving through uncertainty while carrying its own capacity for survival. By returning the tiger and magpie to a contemporary setting, I want to reconsider these inherited symbols as living figures rather than images belonging only to the past.