My passion is animation.
Ever since I was a child, I was always so conflicted about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had many different interests: storytelling, drawing, speaking, coding, acting, and music. I couldn’t see myself abandoning any of these interests to specialize in just one thing as I got older. As I expanded my knowledge of the arts, I found myself slowly falling in love with animation.
Animation is the beautiful result of many different people who are from different fields, backgrounds, and experiences, coming together and uniting their skills to make something truly astonishing. As a child, I admired how much work and coordination there had to be to create an animated project. Whether it was something as small as a short or something as big as a movie, collaboration was the key to making the piece feel united.
However, it is not only the multi-faceted aspect of animation that I came to admire, but also its ability to share stories and messages, in many ways unlike any other medium. Art by itself can be beautiful – but art with a MEANING, a message, is what truly touches the hearts of others.
I’ve always been grateful that I’ve grown up in such a politically active generation; it’s allowed me to become more globally aware and has given me insight into many ongoing issues today that I never would have known about otherwise.
Being Korean, I know how important it is to fight for my rights. I know the consequences of inaction, and that if people don’t work to stop corruption and injustice when they see it, it only gets worse later. I love how art explores how different people view the world in different ways – whether it be through bold styles, perfected composition, or any of the hundreds of different parts of making an art piece.
I don’t just want to awe people with my artwork- I want to inform them and inspire them to take action. Animation is mainly a visual medium, which helps greatly in improving clarity when people like me use it to SAY something. I want to entertain the people who view my animations and make them think seriously about the world around them and their own personal beliefs. I want to change minds. I want to change ways. In the future, if I make at least one person say, “This artist inspired me to start changing something in my life,” then I feel my life goal has been accomplished.
And so that is why when I grow up, I’m going to be an animator.
East Brunswick High School
Seeds of the League Scholarship-2019
Korean
