<Box People>

People confine themselves to their own small boxes. We assure ourselves that we are safe, stable, and whole, unaware that our perspectives are limited by the small spaces we inhabit. The walls of these boxes are so rigid that it becomes difficult to communicate properly beyond them. We often misunderstand or disregard other people's boxes while we barely perceive our own. Imagination acts as a portal that we can use to escape our boxes, which define our daily lives.

In my project, "Box People," I have created a variety of three-dimensional shapes that are actually basic cubes once viewed from certain angles. They represent the confined self and one's limited perspectives, but they also resemble gemstones and imply that the people these boxes represent glow like gems. Some of these boxes are contorted or irregular, and all of them are different sizes. Some of my pieces use a line to suggest three-dimensionality, and these lines work as gestures toward the viewer but also reflect the limitations of these boxes, which cannot reach beyond themselves. Additionally I made boxes out of masonite, a common kind of wood used for building walls and doors. I did so to reflect the impenetrability of our perspectives, and how this makes true dialogue difficult between groups of all kinds - race, culture, gender etc. Despite representing the limitations of our existence, these geometrical shapes in my work are also the birthplace of my imaginary world and act as this world's most basic element, the same way a word is the most basic element of a story. Every day, in whatever nook, cranny, or corner I can find (because "a room of one's own" is not available to a mother), the imaginary, impractical, and unproductive world I create lightens my box, my corner. The free, colorful world of imagination expands beyond my small white box and the focused, silent moments of that world's origin. And by arranging and rearranging this simple element, the box, something new and more complex can spring organically from it.

I also started a flash fiction project during the pandemic as a daily personal practice. As an immigrant mother and a female artist, I applied my personal experiences to my creative work although my stories often revolve around imaginary beings and artificial intelligence. As I waded deeper into this project, I found myself creating marginalized characters to reflect my own experiences of isolation in a society defined by the patriarchy and other power structures. My project "Box People," which includes written stories, arose from the flash fiction project; these two projects are closely related, and as one grows, so does the other. While the linguistic and visual worlds are often thought of as two separate spheres, I aim to build a bridge between them. The dialogue between writing and art allows me to construct an imaginary world that on the one hand offers me refuge from daily life, and on the other allows me to witness how our boxes, and in turn our current systems, are simultaneously violent and fragile.

<My Box, My Corner>

I’m not sure when I first recognized that I was living in a box. Perhaps it was the moment that I felt an orgasmic experience listening to heavy metal in my earbuds for the first time in the two years since my daughter was born. Or maybe it was when I started drawing and painting while my daughter was sleeping, pursuing my thwarted childhood dream of being an artist. Or it could have been the time I tried to find a daytime moon with my daughter on our daily walk. It also could've been when the pandemic started, and I was forced to stay in Korea with a broken relationship for a year and started a daily five-minute writing project. In each of those moments I felt carefree, and it dawned upon me that during the rest of the time, I was living in a box. I also recognized that, to be able to know that and live with it, my box needs a peephole for me to look through to the outside.

My box is determined by my identity and my characteristics, both those I've chosen and those that have been decided for me, as well as the external conditions I face. I am the mother of a seven-year-old daughter and a Korean who has been living in the San Francisco Bay Area for eight years. Marriage, motherhood, and immigration have pushed me into a tight box framed by those conditions. In Korea, an extremely education-oriented society, I received what I thought was an equal education, and my life was centered around achieving success just as a man would do. But I realized after getting married that the sort of success and self-realization I was pursuing weren't available to married women in most families. My relationships with my family and friends were fragile in the US, where the community of people who speak my language, share my culture, and do not treat me like an alien is constantly fluctuating. I crawled into an even smaller box during the pandemic when hatred for Asian immigrants reached a high. While raising my daughter, I also saw myself become a box of love and protection for her; while these words are kind, this space was still a limited one for her to grow in.

At the same time, everything about my past self is part of my box: my dreams as a child who wanted to become an artist, the time I spent as a teenager fantasizing about being a trapeze artist while I sat in a cube-like classroom throughout the long school day that ran from 7 AM to 11 PM, the books that I’ve binged, my eight months of travel, my desire to become a war correspondent after learning that people are all connected, the jobs that I chose, the people I have met, my religion, my values, and my habits. In a box built by my past and current experiences, I see the world, I sometimes judge it, I feel limited, I feel safe, I realize how unstable and imperfect that world is—brittle yet simultaneously difficult to escape—and imagine the world beyond my boundaries through the small hole in my box.

I also realized that I’m not the only one in a box. Men, people without children to care for, people who stay in the same place all their lives, people with power, celebrities, hermits, and those who wage war—everyone is stuck in their own boxes. These boxes are so rigid that it becomes difficult to communicate properly. Not only do we often misunderstand or disregard other people's boxes, but we also often do not perceive our own. Living in spaces shaped for ourselves, we may misjudge others' shapes and communicate more insensitively than AI.

Imagination acts as a portal that we can use to escape our daily lives. Every day, for five minutes in a corner of my home (“a room of one’s own” is not allowed to a mother), I write, paint, and create an imaginary world. Daydreaming, imagination, delusion, whatever you want to call it, that impractical and unproductive activity, has lightened my box, my corner. Though every person lives in their own box, and though the human world might be one huge box as it is described in the movie *The Matrix*, imagination and art make those boxes glow like gemstones, refracting light from different angles. Imagination allows humans to have conversations outside of the limitations of their own boxes and also to come up with ways to survive inside of them. Since the beginning of human history, humans have engaged in individual and collective imaginative activities to punch holes through their respective boxes, and I believe that these activities differentiate human beings from other species and AI.