twisted elegance.

I am enamored by beauty, in people, places and things. My cousin told me, that as a child, I had a peculiar penchant for insightful observation. I would sit on doorsteps, stare out the windows of buses during our impromptu excursions, or go plucking about on the Los Angeles city streets... and I would just stare at the scenery enfolding before my very eyes. I would marvel at an upturned smile on a passer-byers face, lapse into existential reverie passing by the decaying feet of a transient lying on a bench, hop in and out of puddles with my makeshift, paper-sewn sandals... I remember, most specifically, going to Century City mall with my petite yet noble Korean grandmother, as we fingered the clothing in upscale retailers, touching the fabric with a curious delicacy, following its folds and texture. She would look at the tag on the inside, and with a nod and a cheeky grin of smug satisfaction, say "Good", if the item happened to be made in the United States. If it were made in Hong Kong, she would crinkle her nose and move along.

That love and appreciation for beauty has translated in many different ways, physical and immaterial. I've found also, that beauty for me has evolved or metamorphasized over the years and the accumulation of life experiences. For me, beauty is not always pretty. In fact, some of the most beautiful aspects in life lay bare in those battle scars, hard fought and hard won, but mightily claimed. I began to develop an almost vulgar taste for the acrid, the sorts of films and plotlines that were anything but virtuous or whimsical, devoid of the prototypical, Walt Disney sugary ending. Movies that once haunted me became embodiments of truth, stripped of artifice and vaingloriousness. I watched films such as The Virgin Suicides, American Beauty, Blow, Monster, Behind the Sun and City of God with a sense of savage rage, blood-curdling passion, reckless abandon, renewed luminosity... And yet I found, in those sad endings, tragic story lines, and maladroit adaptations of our tortured existence, a life LIVED.. truly, richly and densely. I made sense of the insensible, found beauty in the grittiness, understood more deeply the binaries and dichotomies crossing the span of generations, and related to the pain, the atrocity, the hypocrisy with an almost unnerving acuteness.

i'm still finding myself, what it means to be human. what it means to fall and fumble and yet still rise. what human dignity means, compassion, a sense of unbridled righteousness and strength in even turbulent waters. i rise and i stand, aware of the possibilities that lie in wait as the world turns and the horizons expand beyond the naked eye's wildest imagination. This, I Know.