Sooyoung Kim

Sooyoung: I have the habit of sensitively looking at my inner self and recording it. One day, when I took out and read all these records, there was something I discovered about myself: I repeat the same mistakes and repeatedly regret them. Although, on the outside, I had endeavoured to look like a person who was all good, I realised to my dismay that my dark side could not be hidden. I wanted to express this darkness – and the dark side of human beings – in a book.

Human beings know what it is to be good. As such, laws, moral attitudes and canons have been created. And we live our lives to these rules. I believe that, even if there were no rules with regard to human relationships and personal issues, the conscience of people is, on the whole, similar. We endeavour to behave in a way that maintains the good in our society.

I believe that although human beings make great efforts to behave well, the cause of our repeated failures lie in our instincts. There are the basic instincts of the human body like appetite and sexual desire, but we are also born with many other instincts, including the desire for possessions, the desire to rule or dominate somebody, etc. Something that is different between human beings and animals is that human beings make an effort to control or suppress individual instincts. But by making this effort, can our instincts be controlled forever?

As human beings, we must fight our overwhelming instincts until the day we die. The instincts themselves are not bad though. It is only when we lose the fight against these instincts that we see them as bad.

In the beginning, I started searching for ways to represent ‘animal instincts’ and ‘being unable to hide them’, rather than the thought of making a story. During the ceaseless process of speaking metaphorically and creating the images, I decided that the concept of ‘hair’ was the most suitable for expressing my thoughts. This is because hair grows and grows again after cutting it, and the appearance of human beings with long hair is like that of an animal.

I tried using watercolour, gouache, pencils and charcoal, but I was unable to bring the hair to life. In order to express the hair more realistically, I ended up using pens. And in order to draw the hair really well, I searched for the most suitable pens and did a lot of practice to get the right expression in the lines.

My hair was long at the time, so to understand the lines within hair even better, I cut and scanned my hair, and looked at it closely.

As hair (especially cut hair) is a collection of fine lines of which the directions and lengths are different, if things went wrong when creating the artwork, the images could become weak. In order to solve this, I worked on the overall surface area of the images to create more strength. This also had the effect of the hair looking like a relief carving.

To express people's collective behaviour to maintain the good in society, I used the technique of stamping. I'd already used this technique when exploring concepts in the beginning, but it ended up becomming an important element in the images, which I employed in various ways.

The stamping technique was used on a selection of textured paper. The textures created by the paper and the paints created variety, reduced monotony, and made the movements of the people more lively.

The reason why the characters' bodies were made to look the same was to portray people behaving in the same way. In contrast, the intention behind the different faces was to show that people find their own ways to hide things about themselves, much like the protagonist wants to hide his hair.

Going back to the significance of suppressing one's instincts: the artwork intends to highlight the ‘mask’ and ‘make-up’. I also tried to give the work an overall unity, and used diverse portrayals of the characters to emphasise their individuality.

This book was first made as a graduation project at the SI Picture Book School. At the time, the content of the book was the protagonist repeating the work of cutting their hair. In that simple story structure, with regard to the portrayal of despair coming from the repetition of the actions, there was success to a certain extent. But despite the fact that hair is a part of my body, it cannot be perfectly controlled even if I use all my strength – and I realised the story needed to show the innate limitations of human beings.

In order to solve such problems and give the story a sense of completeness, the dummy book was reworked many times. Through this process, the images were created while considering in even more depth the eyes of the readers, the flow of emotions, etc. And so, my many ideas for the scenes were sketched out. However, I found that some sketches were good on their own but did not work well in the dummy book, and some sketches worked well in the dummy book but were not what I expected when I created the final versions. I felt that to work diligently and to keep moving my hands was the only way to solve the problem.

I became pregnant while making this book, which made it very difficult to work. So I am thankful that I was able to make it through that period and get the book published. This is my first book, and because its publication coincided with the birth of my child, it means a lot to me.

As this is a picturebook without any words, I hope that the reader's inner voice will be added. Because my way of storytelling can be difficult to understand, there have been readers who have needed to look at the book several times. If by reading the book multiple times, the images are seen properly and if it becomes possible for readers to think deeply, it is a delightful thing for me as the author.

In the future, I would like to throw out more questions to people, and make books that inspire them to think.

Illustrations © Sooyoung Kim. Post translated by Gengo and edited by dPICTUS.

Buy this picturebook

털 / The Hair

Sooyoung Kim

Somebooks, Korea, 2013

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‘Sooyoung Kim creates an intense and disturbing world in this handcrafted production... The suffering and pain of the central character in transition is described with powerful drama and intensity. A strong left to right linear dynamic heightens the sense of the character's physical and metaphorical journey. Disturbing and enigmatic, this is a highly compelling debut.’
—The BolognaRagazzi Award Jury