Seungju Kim

Homesick

'Homesick' shows Seungju's feelings that she often feels during waiting for transportation to go home. The cold weather and snowy winter enhance her feeling of loneliness, and Seungju always needs to fight the loneliness alone without her family, who can give her much mental support.

“As I am an international student, there are lots of moments I feel lonely. There are many challenges during studying abroad alone, like stressful moments from the language barrier and missing family and friends in Korea so badly. Also, the long cold weather in Canada enhances these feelings more these days, especially whenever I wait for transportation to go home. I used to think there was no reason I needed to go home. My family is not living there, and there are no missed people. The transportation in my artwork 'Homesick' represents where people usually wait for their transportation, so there are some elements like a subway station pillar and bus stop. I created my own spaces to express my feeling at that moment. The artwork has a chilling tone due to the blue and white cold scheme, and the broken part of scanned data, like winter trees on both sides of the bench, gives a sense of imperfect and incompleteness. This unstable status of data is acceptable for expressing my feeling of loneliness. Also, there is a pillar of the Osgoods subway station where I usually went to go to school to embed my own life experience in my artwork. The entire scene is like a snowstorm swept away, and the spotlight shines on the bench in the middle of the scene to provide contrast by creating comfort in a harsh and cold environment, which not only makes focus on the bench but also enhances the idea of craving to return to my hometown.”