“The frontiers of the book,” wrote Michel Foucoult long before these modes of writing hypertext or retrieving data from the Net emerged, “are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configurations and its autonomous form, it is caught in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within network.” [...] Reality does not run along the neat straight lines of the printed page. Only by “criss-crossing the complex topical landscape” can the “twin goals of highlighting multifacetedness and establishing multiple connections” even begin to be attained. Hypertext makes it possible for “single (or even small numbers of) connecting threads” to be assembled into a “‘woven’ interconnectedness” in which “strength of connection derives from the partial overlapping of many different strands of connectedness across cases rather than from any single strand running through large numbers of cases…”

After graduating, I moved to NYC and became aware that I didn't have what it would take to become an artist. I realized that art is not something intuitive or that you were born gifted. You have to earn it, and I had not yet earned the knowledge of what material would help me come up with ideas. The next 10 years became my true education: I met a lot of artists and architects through the non-profit gallery my ex-husband, Kyong founded, Storefront for Art and Architecture. Eventually, when I did become an artist, my work was very research-based. It was not this intuitive thing where I would just, like, draw something. Instead, I spent a lot of time learning about material that interested me, and eventually, it sort of crystallized in the visual images I create.

“The ability to ask beautiful questions, often in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it as it does by having it answered. And you don’t have to do anything about it. You just have to keep asking. And before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.”

— David Whyte, On Being interview “The Conversational Nature of Reality”