Odyssey

The title points two ways. It nods to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s the monolith, and the threshold into a rebirth that isn’t quite human. It’s also my own odyssey years, most of my twenties spent changing shape, looking for the way out of a room I couldn’t name.

The project works through opposition. Old against new. The set is a time capsule, a room sealed off from a decade that was never mine, where nothing works and the air has gone still. Then space against body. The room wants to hold her, while the body is mineral and twisted and wants out.

Underneath that, this is a self-portrait made through a model’s body. I handed my odyssey years to a figure who isn’t me and let her wear them, so I’m in every frame but kept a body’s width away from it.

She moves through four looks, which are really four ways through the same room. Armor, give up, reach, dissolve. They run from the most shut-down to the most see-through, the way you tend to move when you’re trying to leave.

At the end it cuts inside against outside, a hard cut from that airless room to an ordinary street. The release is unfinished on purpose. The street still carries the capsule’s light out with her. Like the star child over Earth, getting through isn’t the same as arriving.

Odyssey

The title points two ways. It nods to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s the monolith, and the threshold into a rebirth that isn’t quite human. It’s also my own odyssey years, most of my twenties spent changing shape, looking for the way out of a room I couldn’t name.

The project works through opposition. Old against new. The set is a time capsule, a room sealed off from a decade that was never mine, where nothing works and the air has gone still. Then space against body. The room wants to hold her, while the body is mineral and twisted and wants out.

Underneath that, this is a self-portrait made through a model’s body. I handed my odyssey years to a figure who isn’t me and let her wear them, so I’m in every frame but kept a body’s width away from it.

She moves through four looks, which are really four ways through the same room. Armor, give up, reach, dissolve. They run from the most shut-down to the most see-through, the way you tend to move when you’re trying to leave.

At the end it cuts inside against outside, a hard cut from that airless room to an ordinary street. The release is unfinished on purpose. The street still carries the capsule’s light out with her. Like the star child over Earth, getting through isn’t the same as arriving.

PHOTOGRAPHY & ART DIRECTION ROCKY
MOTION CAPTURING & VIDEO YUJIN PARK
STYLING JOHN
MODEL BLAIRE
MAKE-UP QETO, SIKI RONG
ASSISTANT JI
SPECIAL THANKS PROP HAUS NYC

WEARING V WARKOW, PEILIN CHEN, KMMY STUDIO