How Do We Live

I want to preface this post by saying that it's late and I'm pretty emotional right now, so I'm unsure of whether I should be blogging, but I have a lot of thoughts and need to release them or sort them or whatever this is. A lot has happened over the course of this summer, and a lot in just this one week. The pulse shooting, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile's murders, the attack on Dallas police officers during a peaceful protest, the suicide bombers in Istanbul's Airport, the attack in Nice, the bombings in Iraq, in Syria, and so many more. There is so much pain in this "modern" world that we live in, and it feels like there is more and more everyday. Seeing all this pain, all this hate, scares me. Scares me because I feel hopeless and helpless, watching these things happen, over and over, while the world mourns endlessly. Scares me to imagine how a human can do these things to other human beings. Scares me to try to comprehend the pure amount of life that has been lost. And I don't mean life as a numeric value, but life as in the rich and complex collection of stories, memories, experiences, personality, family, and thoughts that make up one single person. Most of us have unfortunately been touched by death. Losing one family member, one neighbor, one teacher, or one friend is already incomprehensible as it is. All of the life that existed within them, stopped. Now trying to imagine that pain multiplied thousands and thousands of times for millions of people around the world. How can anyone sleep at night, eat their meals, and go on living after causing that kind of pain?

When Matt Damon spoke at our graduation, he left us with the words "turn towards the problems you see." And naturally he means to face the problems head on, to try and make a difference in this world. But all I can do right now is to turn towards the problems and stare at them in absolute paralyzing fear. When I heard these words at graduation, tears welled up in my eyes, not because I was fired up and ready to take on the world, but because I was afraid of the world and I was convinced that I could not possibly make a difference. There is a lot of beauty around us. There is love, and compassion, and wonderful people making differences in other's lives, even in the smallest ways. And multiplied by hundreds of millions, one could say that there is much more "good" than "bad". But somehow violence has a way of obscuring your vision and drawing your complete attention to one ugly mark on a much larger and much more complex surface. I'm scared, but I want to help expand that surface and add my own small marks. Maybe only a handful of people will notice those marks, will be affected by my attempts, but being able to make a difference in a handful of lives might be something worth living for.

I want to end this post by sending my condolences to the family and loved ones of the MIT student who was hit and killed earlier today by an off-duty cop who was drunk driving. I'm stunned and heartbroken to hear this news about a recent graduate who had his whole life in front of him.

Human lives are so fragile. How do we live so that when we die, we can die without regret?

Sun Shower

Currently sitting downstairs sipping downing cups of lemonade while trying to blog, but in reality just reading viral articles and watching cooking videos on Facebook. Not much to ramble about this time (my mind is fixating on dumb things like Pokemon GO right now) so I'm just gonna do pictures and captions!

Open grilled cheese and a strawberry + blueberry smoothie for lunch! Yes I used the DSLR to take this one lol.

Mom bought panko crumbs so I made chicken katsu curry :3 Pro-tip: Crumbs are so much more satisfying than just using corn starch

Interestingly presented unagi-don on lunch date with mom - Little Lamb Mongolian Hotpot at home! all the deliciousness at a small fraction of the price - made red bean mochi with kaylin! She had so much fun folding them, it was so cute *___* - and spare ribs in dry wok at my mom's favorite Sichuan restaurant

Gorgeous sunset in town center while waiting for the fireworks to start 

My town's Fourth of July fireworks! My favorites are the giant gold rain and the red ones that zip around in a bunch of directions haha - my absolute least favorites are the super loud and bright ones that temporarily blind and deafen you *__* literally flash bombs.

Spent the 4th in NYC with mom and kaykay! My mom took us to watch the Summer Spectacular at the Radio City Music Hall! I didn't really have any expectations going in since I had no idea what type of show it was supposed to be, but HOLY LORD it was amazing!! (or one can say, spectacular huhu) The show was choreographer by Mia Michaels who did an absolutely beautiful job with the choreo, staging, and overall effect - at one point I was so overwhlemed by the powerful dancing, live orchestra, and lighting/effects that I almost cried LOL. 

We grabbed an early dinner at Ippudo Ramen which surprisingly had ZERO WAIT. Oh my god it must've been our lucky day (one time I went and the wait was three hours....) Anyway, we had their beer battered karaage to start and I got the spicy tonkotsu ramen - slightly regretted the tonkotsu tbh (miso 5ever) but it was still delicious :3 Also their chopstick stands rock. Yes that was a pun.

Some sketches from these past two weeks! Spending more time on figure studies

More sketches! Humans of New York has some great photos to reference

So I posted this picture last time (left) but I made some changes to it (right). Cleaned up some of the lines, added some objects to the background, and applied a blur to achieve some foreground-background distinction. I think it makes the girl pop a little more :D

Hehe did some food-themed illustrations! First one is for my Ramen love and second is for my Yushiang Eggplant love <3 Starting to get more comfortable with digital painting, but at the same time getting more and more frustrated (does that even make sense?) It's really easy for me to get caught up in the details and over-render the image / lose sight of the image as a whole. Atleast now that I am aware of it I can look out for it!

Beautiful sun shower the other day as I was sketching in the kitchen

Eric came to visit this weekend (!!!!!) so we went to the city on Saturday! In the morning we went to go check out the gallery at the Society of Illustrators. They had a pretty cool exhibit celebrating women artists in fantasy and science fiction and one on comic and cartoon art. It was super exciting to see the work of some artists that I really admire in person, and I also learned of so many more that I have since stalked on Instagram >:D Museums are great, but it's also such a nice feeling to see a concentrated body of work that feels more relatable and personally evocative. Not sure if that last sentence made sense, but basically I was very very happy to have made this trip to the gallery. Maybe one day in the far future my work will also make it onto those walls! *___* In the meantime, enjoy some low quality photographs of my favorites from the exhibit. These photos don't do the work justice at all T__T

After the gallery, we hurried back to Times Square while stuffing our face with food-truck food to watch.... THE LION KING. It was amazing!!  The costumes were beautiful and so intricate - the dancing, singing, and orchestra were great - and the acting was really well done (everyone except for Simba portrayed their characters so well *__* lol sorry Simba) I also experienced a lot of feels because 1. Childhood and 2. Minerva and I choreographed a lion king set in DT last year! It's amazing how many different dimensions a single story can be portrayed as. I was in awe of how beautifully they did their interpretation, and at several points I got so sucked in I forgot that I was sitting in a theater watching a performance. Wwwwaaaaaaaaaaa *___*

After the show I was in a super good mood~ We spent the rest of the time shopping in Soho and Eric got to go to some of his streetwear brands that he borderline idolizes :P But I went from amusement to agreement once I stepped foot into some of the stores lol. It's amazing that streetwear is sort of an... art form of sorts? It's like really well executed, not just the clothing design, but the store's interior design too. Kith was super cool - loved their feel for minimalism but also for attention to detail. Took some pictures of their sneaker ceiling and pencil wall! #tourist

On Sunday we had dim sum brunch and then went to the mall for a littttttle more shopping. I (finally) bought these cute Nike Freeruns that I've been low-key eyeing for a long time. Then we picked up kaykay and went to go watch the Secret Life of Pets! I'm really amazed at how far 3D animation has come the past 10 years - the number of studios putting out beautiful feature films is increasing, as is the number of indie animators (there are so many independent shorts online!) The pic of the right is some stuff by a really cool artist we passed in Soho. He does 3D wire sculptures of people that look like realistic shadow people!

I am amazed and appalled at myself for how long it took me to collage and blog this time... I think I need to post a lot more regularly or else I get bogged down with too many pictures to keep track of. Anyway, some other exciting developments in my life include having a phone interview last friday and getting asked to come visit the studio! They're being a bit slow in scheduling a time for that, but I am soso excited. They do a lot of cool art-meets-technology-multi-disciplinary work *__* fingers crossed!

Anyway, time for bed! Gotta wake up early to send Kaykay to dance camp (she is SO CUTE with her bun and leotard :'D ) Hopefully tomorrow will be more productive than today (I did virtually nothing T__T). Slowly but surely I will blog more often!