Last penpal trade of 2013 Seoul // Chicago!!!! Happy 2014~

Heui and I decided to choose a poem and illustrate it for our last drawing swap of the year 2013

I just received Heui's AMAZING illustration in the mail a few days ago, set to Korean poet Yoon Dong-Ju 's poem:

Prologue

Let me have no shame
Under the heaven
Till I die

Even the sound of wind
Passing the leaves
Pained my heart
With a heart singing stars
I will love all dying things
And I must step my path
That's been given to me

Tonight also

The wind sweeps past among the stars

Heui's illo is a beautiful vision of a beautiful poem :)

 I chose a poem by Russian poet Anna Akhmatova:

Your lynx-eyes, Asia,
spy on my discontent;
they lure into the light
my buried self,
something the silence spawned,
no more to be endured
than the noon sun in Termez.
Pre-memory floods the mind
like molten lava on the sands...
as if I were drinking my own tears
from the cupped palms of a stranger's hands.
   -- 1945

I tried out painting on this thin sheet of birch wood

We both wrote our translated poems on the back of the artwork! (and they both seemed to be very emotional poems...ahaha)

2nd penpal drawing between Seoul // Chicago!

Heui and I both got each other's second assignments in the mail!

This theme was a portrait of our grandmothers. I think our relationship with our grandmother comes out through the way we approached the renditions.

Heui's grandma:

my grandma (I called her "婆婆" (po-po)):

She taught me how to fold origami and she used to make 饅頭 (mantou) or chinese steamed buns/bread a lot.

unhatching a new Penpal project..

My friend Heuiwon and I are starting a penpal (or maybe it's more like a paintpal) project! We still need to iron out the details but here's a look at our first project. We painted each other's portraits and then snail-mailed them to each other! We just received each other's pieces in the mail - now it's time to find a nice frame :D

Hoping to build this into an ongoing project so will post some updates on it as it develops :)

 Heui's portrait of me with cute cat ears ^_^

 a close up

Cats were surprisingly the theme since I also added Heui's cat, Haru, to her portrait: