I am an illustrator who acts as a conductor rather than a soloist. The verb to conduct, originating from the Latin conducere, means “to lead together” or “to bring together.”
A conductor is not a dictator issuing unilateral commands, but someone who steps directly into the flow of sound, drawing independent agents into a shared resonance. I began this journey through the oral histories of my grandfather, driven by a desire to amplify marginalised peoples, erased memories, and the voices lost in the transmission of history. Illustration often functions as a singular practice, a direct rendering of knowledge or emotion onto a surface. My practice, however, moves closer to that of a director: gathering information, establishing rules, and assigning visual metaphors to create conditions for interpretation. When a sound naturally resonates and reaches deep into an audience, a profound communion forms between the performers and listeners, uniting a collective through shared resonance rather than command. This position led me to question: Could an illustration system move beyond the borders of my canvas to create conditions through which other voices speak?
To explore this, I translated live performance structures into illustrative language, drawing from stage director Hyojeong Yu’s cue sheet framework, which half-fills a blank page with conditions to allow unexpected interactions among performers, audiences, and space. For instance, I mapped the organisational logic of a set list, linking artists to their respective songs, onto narrative structures, translating main characters into specific scenes and events. Inspired by Dogme 95, I established five structural rules for my visual score:
- Duration: Drawing space size is bound to narrative duration.
- Character and Voice: The main character must always appear alongside the main voice (represented as a quarter note), while the chorus (represented as eighth notes) surrounds, echoes, and interrupts the main voice to introduce a collective perspective.
- Framing: Canvas geometry evolves from simple circles to polygons with more vertices as narrative complexity increases.
- Notation: Graphic marks serve as environmental cues rather than descriptive depictions.
- Indeterminate Response: The score leaves structural gaps for participants to fill.
However, implementing these rules immediately raised questions regarding my system’s authority: How firm, yet flexible, should my conditions be? When the relationship between duration and spatial framing becomes overly rigid, the score risks becoming a dictatorial enclosure rather than an inviting stage. Giving a longer narrative more space within a shared drawing area leaves less room for another contribution, directly affecting possibilities elsewhere. Collaboration therefore requires an ongoing act of orchestration: I set the tempo, listen, adjust, and conduct again.
Looking back at Unit 2, I initially treated music as a mechanical translation device. Working with conflicting archival records of my great-great-grandfather, Sang-Mu Seo, an independence activist in Korean accounts but a criminal in Japanese colonial records, I brought a Music Theory Tree into conversation with Borges’s The Library of Babel. Notes identified central figures, modes framed perspectives, and chords brought viewpoints together without forcing resolution. The same fragment could be understood differently depending on the accounts placed beside it.
While this arrangement made room for polyphonic coexistence, I realised a fundamental limitation: I was treating the system as a closed machine, acting as a metaphorical surrogate speaking for others. As I extended this methodology to erased historical narratives, reworking museum floor plans to examine how spatial navigation shapes encounters with history, I confronted my positionality as a Korean diaspora practitioner raised in Vietnam and working in London. Why was I compelled to represent these silenced histories, and through what authority? The route, sequence, and surrounding material were already shaping the encounter before a viewer reached an individual story.
Working across cultures, I navigate dense histories, translating non-linear Korean narratives for international audiences while reframing them for native ones. Musical notation offered a shared language of structure and atmosphere, allowing me to move from speaking alone towards coordinating contributions. My attention shifted towards what happens between them: when they enter, how long they remain, and how one contribution changes the conditions for another.
Minjeong An’s diagram for KoK helped articulate this shift from translating stories into a composed image towards orchestrating contributions. I read her work as treating life itself as a stage, populating symbolic spaces with audiences carrying precise instruments and objects. An brings these elements into a meticulous arrangement for viewers to interpret. My approach asks how such an arrangement might become a score that other makers can act upon, introducing contingency, friction, and collective response. If a participant changes their contribution, what else needs to respond? Which relationships should remain stable, and which could be renegotiated?
The primary limitation of my current work lies in its boundaries. My score proposes a way to coordinate human voices and archival fragments, but it remains untested with other makers. Furthermore, it largely treats surrounding conditions as something I can establish and participants can negotiate. This leaves a critical question: How could the score communicate relationships whose limits are not ours to decide?
Earth system tipping points give this question a specific context. They concern thresholds beyond which change can become self-sustaining, potentially producing cascading effects across connected physical systems. Here, the relationships being represented are non-human physical processes rather than connections established through my visual arrangement. Their timing, uncertainty, and consequences place demands on the score that my existing rules may not accommodate.
Moving forward, I aim to refine this illustration score into a visual instrument for exploring these relationships. Working from selected climate research, makers could develop contributions in which a shift in one element prompts a response elsewhere. The score would need to distinguish researched scientific connections from artistic interpretation and make differences in timescale visible.
Until now, I have gathered, interpreted, translated, and communicated research largely through my own hands and mind. I now want to explore a generative cycle: I construct conditions, others contribute, we encounter one another, and what emerges changes both our understanding and the conditions we began with.
Through this shift, visual metaphors are no longer tools of burden meant to compress heavy information into a single symbolic image that I alone must decode. Instead, they become a conductor’s language, guiding principles that help multiple makers’ works shine in their own directions. True orchestration requires accepting dissonance; an orchestra is not a singular synthesiser playing a pre-programmed track, but independent agents interacting within a shared atmospheric environment.
Ultimately, music became the primary metaphor of my practice because it best enacts a society of togetherness. When the mechanical systems of structure and the organic flow of performance mesh to transmit a shared language, and when that language touches people deeply enough to create a “miracle of resonance”—moving us to act not out of obligation, but out of a shared desire to be together—does the illustrator’s positionality not finally shed its unilateral form and realise itself most powerfully in contemporary society? By moving away from static representation toward open scoring, I stop claiming sole authority to speak for the archive or the planet, and instead design frameworks through which diverse audiences and makers can listen, navigate, and respond to the urgent contingencies of our contemporary context.
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