Self Portraiture at CMU's Summer Program

As a Korean American, I am familiar with Korean adages: "나이가 마흔이 되면 자기 얼굴에 책임을 져야 한다" meaning a person should be responsible for his own face at 40 years old. It infers that one's personality and life how they have lived for years reflects on their appearance as they get older. When I met the famous painters' self-portraits like Rembrandt and Van Gogh at the Metropolitan Museum, I could imagine their desire and struggle bleeding through their evolving visages with the passage of time.

Self portraits are more than just a record of a person's appearance. Many artists draw themselves to tell viewers about their inner world by using visual languages. Often, the staring eyes or faintly smiling lips in the portraits intrinsically send their intense emotion.

In my portrait, I wanted to share my true nature. Almost every moment whenever I made the choices until middle school, I couldn't decide easily. I always hesitated. Not to make any mistakes, I tried to overthink so I oftentimes missed the timing to choose, resulting in missed opportunities or suboptimal outcomes. My inner wavering for making decisions seemed to be my physical difficulty; I have crossed eyes that seem unfocused when I look at the object. Of course, my eyes are corrected now (perhaps?) and my indecisive mind also has been changed to more opinionated.

My self-portrait deploys two aspects: physical defect and intrinsic struggle. In the drawing, I tried to express the "What if…" scenario that ruled my mind through my crossed eyes. As I drew overlapped eyes, my procrastinating traits were rendered. Graphite which was a perfect medium built up the smooth layer and delivered detailed features of my identity as its laid bare.