With Drawings (2025)
1.
Growing up, I carried a lot of sorrow inside. Maybe that’s why, when I peered into the holes in the ivory-colored concrete walls of the narrow alley, they felt like holes in my own body.
Since I was little, I often scratched my body for no reason. Scratching would lift small pieces of skin, and those lifted bits became the reason for the next scratch — one reason creating another.
2. Lightly sketched infinity goggles looked enviable. They seemed able to see far beyond my reach, yet they felt less like goggles and more like another space—both closed and open.
3.
A person aboard a bus travels somewhere, half by will and half by circumstance. The desire to escape the space allotted to me faded when life became bearable, only to surface again.
One stop, two stops, and between the next, I booked a flight to Seoul. While on the move, I once again reserved the possibility of moving—half by choice and half by circumstance.
4.
Drawing is like straining life through a fine sieve. I cherish the fragile yet resilient power inherent in it. To live like a drawing, or like a poem. Poetry and drawing are alike: within their seemingly complete, easily grasped forms, infinite layers become visible. The more you look, the more you realize you can never fully see them—that is poetry, and that is drawing.
I strain thoughts through a fine sieve. To capture the essence closest to its original form, I choose and choose again the most precise words and expressions. Yet what remains uncaptured still lingers there—and inevitably becomes visible.
5.
A ship laden with grain passes by. The sea lies flat, and the ship cuts through the water, moving across it. I pray earnestly that a strong force shields it, keeping it from running aground.
6. I live with a constant anxiety—almost a certainty—that something is growing inside me. As always, it’s a troublesome condition discovered by chance by a doctor I visited for something else. Until I face the results, I find myself reflecting on everything from the past. Even if I promise to do better from now on, if something is growing inside me, we simply cannot know until it reveals its true nature.
7.
Sitting in a clean restroom, I saw a drawing of a toilet brush before me: “Please use the toilet brush.” The posture of the brush, drawn hair by hair with curling, uneven lines, held a strange sincerity. That crooked yet upright stance seemed worth borrowing.
8. Updates postponed, feet drag slowly. Is it a scholar’s cap being worn, or cables dangling without sockets, or a tray carried in hope that someone might fill it? Legs walk an unknown road with an unknown rhythm.
9. Always, a readiness to leave. A bag packed for a home on the far side of the earth, ready at any moment.
And ready to move on from there, if that’s what it takes.
10. Many nights passed alone—weepingly, pitifully—yet with a heartless prayer that morning light would make things fine. I drew stars, tracing them as water fell to the ground. The thought that even unmoving stars might slowly trace their path down to earth comforted me.
11.
Even as I made this drawing, I don’t think I had fully forgiven a friend who left this world too soon. After his disappearance, I uprooted my entire life for my own reasons. That’s why I haven’t been able to visit his grave again. Remembering him, I had to confront my doubts about standing firmly on the ground with both feet—and the resilience that stance embodies.
12.
This is a picture of hibernation. Without realizing it, I often wish for perfect hearts and bodies—both my own and others’. But soon enough, the absence of such perfection becomes clear: a sleep that sinks into deep slumber, accompanied by scarred skin and awkwardly healing wounds. And still, the scarf remains in place.
13. Attention to others’ lives was not always there. On the subway, people respond to each other’s smallest motions without realizing it, only to return home and spend the night alone. Then that realization turns into curiosity about other lives and struggles. We—with our thin, delicate tentacles, and at the same time our thick, lonely souls—inevitably find ourselves observing others closely. Stealing glances here and there, trying desperately to escape, and then knocking again, dreaming of fate.
©JEONGAN CHOI 2025