I. Control and Concealment in Being Seen

During the Unit 1 exhibition, I often found myself “negotiating placement” with my tutors. I always wanted my work to be shown in a corner, or somewhere less visible. I would say it was about “atmosphere” or “spatial coherence,” but I know now it was something else—I was unconsciously avoiding being seen. I wasn’t ready to be directly looked at.

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That corner space gave me a sense of safety. It softened the discomfort of being watched. It was the first time I realized that “being viewed” wasn’t a neutral, objective act for me—it was a trigger for a kind of psychological defense mechanism.

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In Unit 2, I began to confront this structural fear more directly. I started asking why I wanted to be seen, and why I also didn’t want to be fully visible too quickly. I admit that, at the start of making work, I was driven by a very direct impulse: I wanted to be impressive. I wanted to be liked. But that desire wasn’t open—it came with intense control, shame management, and pre-staged presentation.

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I wasn’t trying to please the audience—I was trying to manage their gaze. I used images and aesthetic choices to control what they could and couldn’t see. This kind of control over viewing is something I’ve long used as a survival tactic. I fear people seeing me fail, fall apart, or appear less intelligent—just as I never leave the house without makeup, I work hard to make my work “refined enough,” so nothing feels out of control.

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That controlling instinct first showed up in how overly polished and visually “full” my images became. I liked things neat, dense, and complete. But eventually I realized: the more I tried to show an idealized version of myself, the more I was hiding the actual me. I often used visual density and stylization to cover what I wasn’t ready to face directly.

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The first blind spot I began to recognize was this: maybe I never actually wanted to be understood. A lot of the time, I wasn’t even sure what I was trying to say. I could feel a kind of emotional fog, but I didn’t have the language to translate it. That blurry zone used to be a comfort, but it had started to become a trap.

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The introduction of AI changed everything. It wasn’t just a tool—it became a distorted mirror. I no longer needed to articulate things clearly. I let the AI generate, misread, and veer off-course, and then I picked the pieces I was willing to claim. Sometimes I even felt excited by how “wrong” its results were. It led me into spaces I hadn’t dared to enter before, and let me loosen my grip on formal control. That sense of displacement runs through my video piece Who’s There? too. I removed every overly realistic human face—because they were too specific, too real, too much like my own. I couldn’t bear the idea of someone looking directly at my face, so I chose blurring, collage, fragmentation. It wasn’t just an aesthetic decision. It was me redrawing the boundaries of what kind of self-exposure I could tolerate.

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Likewise, I designed the piece to be viewed in a crouched posture. The viewer has to lower their body, crawl under a table-like structure, to access the projection. That posture wasn’t randomly chosen—it was a quiet redistribution of viewing power.

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From Unit 1 to Unit 2, my focus shifted: from using materials to reconstruct personal memory, to using structural mechanisms to choreograph perception. I moved from a small cardboard house tucked in a corner, to a darkened viewing structure that requires viewers to physically adjust themselves. Looking is no longer what I avoid. It’s the terrain I now choose to design.