(Self-Titled) 2017-2021
A self-titled album is a music album where the album’s name is the same as the artist’s name. Artists often choose this naming convention to signify that the album represents their core identity or musical style, making it a self-statement or a signature work. This type of title can also suggest that the album holds significant importance in the artist’s career or highlights the close connection between the work and the artist themselves.
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This is a black-and-white iteration of images I captured between 2017 and 2021, with no specific project or theme in mind. I can hardly describe the immense toll of arranging images from a period spanning five years—especially between the ages of 21 and 26, when I was navigating personal struggles and the changes around me. The editorial process was long and almost brutal. The final result, to me looks like a war relic. As you walk through it, you can see the craters left by explosions, the trajectories carved by bullets. But what you can’t see are the countless times the gunpowder ignited, pierced, and detonated, wiping out bodies one by one.
This experience of organizing the images is why I ultimately chose to present them in black and white—color was inevitably stripped away in the process. Selecting, sharply eliminating, and wrestling with what to keep from these five years of images was like a refining and stripping down of my own “core.” The result is a perfect skeleton, a fossil specimen suspended in mid-air, with a firmly reconstructed core that stands as proof of its existence.
Initially, I planned to turn this work into a book, using Masao Yamamoto’s Small Things in Silience (2020 2nd edition) as my mental reference. But as you can see in the first image, after completing a dummy book, it felt too soft in my hands. The simplicity, lightness, stillness, and gentleness of Silent Little Things were not the feelings I wanted to convey.
So, I concluded that the weight of paper couldn’t bear the weight of these images, but I need to put aside my obsession with materializing them for now and step away from this long, draining process. They will be reborn in a form of more rirgid material.
For now, it shall briefly meet you through the clicks of buttons.