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Farewell ｜Mental Health Awareness Series

At the very beginning of my creative journey, I discovered my keen interest in mental health advocacy, which has become a regular topic for my personal projects. And creating these projects has become an extremely healing practice for me. Farewell is my attempt to rewrite some of my most difficult moments battling with mental health issues through the lens of empathy and love. It consists of a series of personal stories about how, in this alternative world, I was able to find peace while dealing with severe self-hatred towards my body. It is also about letting go of the traumas I used to bear and recalling self-love in moments of despair.

As far as I remember, I’ve always had trouble with my body. Ever since my early childhood, I’ve been struggling with dermatillomania, a mental disorder characterized by compulsive skin picking and gnawing. As a result, I’ve always been reluctant to show my fingers in public, which has been affected the most due to dermatillomania. What’s even worse was the reaction I’d receive from people when they saw my fingers. From strangers to friends and family members, many were shocked and disgusted, and many were concerned and offered interventions immediately, which unfortunately only made me more self-conscious of how abnormal my fingers were. As a result, I've developed a deeper self-disgust towards how my fingers looked and felt, the same fingers I used to create art and write this very sentence.

However, only in the past summer, I was able to face my condition with the help of a licensed therapist. In these sessions we had, I struggled to unpack many past traumas, one of them being my grandmother’s sudden death. I opened up about my pessimistic view of finding no meaning in her death. However, my therapist was able to point out the silver lining that, my late grandmother and those who I love dearly but are no longer with me, still exist in me in a different form. As her blood runs through my veins and the memories of her forever reside in my brain, my body will always remain an extension of my grandmother’s life. Thus, regardless of what my body is going through and how it looks, it should always be cherished as a legacy of hers. And for me, to love my body is to love something greater than myself-those who once put their most sincere love in me.

And this is when the idea of Farewell was conceived. Through Farewell, I embarked on a journey where I revisited myself battling different mental issues and their complications, including eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorders, depression, dermatillomania, and neurodermatitis, a skin condition characterized by chronic itching or scaling that can be triggered by extreme stress and anxiety. But this time I tried to recreate these scenarios where I was able to replace self-loathing with empathy and self-love, the love I acquired from my late grandmother and those who loved me dearly.

And to unveil these private yet complex moments, I constructed my work on a three-dimensional and multi-layered surface mounted with watercolor paper. In these layers lies the most vulnerable part of me, which was once hidden deep and is now open to the public. For me, Farewell is an ode saying goodbye to what once weighed me down and haunted me daily without grudges but best wishes. And through the watercolor marks and color pencil lines, I also hope Farewell will offer a little consolation to those who are struggling with the same conditconditions and hopefully make them feel less lonely.