The Garden I Was Becoming
Beginning on February 18, I began writing as many daily journal entries as possible. Rather than illustrating these moments directly, I revisit them over time, searching for flowers whose meanings resonate with emotions, memories, or quiet truths hidden within the words. Each flower becomes a translation rather than a depiction—a visual language through which lived experience is reinterpreted.
The flowers are translated through unique monotype prints on washi paper and linen, then gathered and layered into larger compositions. Some appear alone, while others meet, overlap, or accumulate, allowing individual fragments of experience to become part of a larger garden. The monotype process itself moves alongside me, naturally responding to shifts in my thoughts and feelings. It embraces variation and imperfection, allowing each print to exist as an unrepeatable moment, much like memory itself.
Accumulated through the year, these fragments gradually form a garden. Individual flowers may carry the memory of a day, a season, a relationship, a transition, or an emotional landscape. Yet no single flower contains the whole story. It is through their accumulation and relationships—their proximity, overlap, repetition, and contrast—that a larger landscape begins to emerge. Together, they form a living archive of personal transformation.
The flowers are neither botanical studies nor imaginary inventions. They exist somewhere between observation and imagination, where meaning and lived experience blur into one another. In the same way, the garden is not a predetermined image, but something that gradually takes shape through the process of making. It evolves as I evolve—continually shaped by uncertainty, change, growth, and reflection.
This exhibition captures one year of a practice that began without a clear destination and continues to unfold through unexpected shifts. Rather than searching for a single conclusion, the work embraces transformation itself as an ongoing process rather than a finished one. What you see here is a portrait of a self still becoming—not composed of words, but of flowers, fragments, layers, and the relationships between them. Together, they reveal an ever-changing inner landscape that continues beyond this year, and beyond this room.