Extracted from A Reflective Object, my thesis book submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Yale University with a major in Graphic Design in April 2025.

It was during my exchange semester in Germany that I first realized being Korean was a part of my identity. In a new environment, you start to notice the gaps and misalignments between yourself and your surroundings. It’s not only the place that feels foreign. You start to feel foreign to yourself as well. You become your own observer, looking into a mirror.

For me, language is where that sense of foreignness is most accentuated. It feels offbeat to pronounce my name with an American accent. And I would sometimes mishear “Do you wanna” as “Jeewon.”

When I began bringing Korean text into my practice in the U.S., I often had to translate it as well. Translation is a deliberate act. Unlike speaking or thinking, where words emerge directly in your chosen language, translation begins with an original. It is an act of connecting the separated input and output languages. You examine what the original is trying to say, spend time choosing the closest possible twin in the translated language, and vice versa. It is almost impossible to fully represent the original, but the translated language gains a uniqueness that the original didn’t have. The translated language then shifts from being a surrogate of the original to becoming a mirror language. They may be unfamiliar to each other, but they are looking into one another. Now I see myself in the mirror—who seemed to be so foreign—and think, I look awkward. But that is me.

A mirror doesn’t show what’s behind it, but it has a certain quality of transparency, in the sense that it reveals whatever it is facing. It is an X-ray object activated by confrontation. I keep returning to this image. While it may be difficult to face the mirror image, I want to be honest with myself and also enjoy the process of discovering it. I believe a good piece of work always contains some kind of truth.

I cannot stop looking at the mirror—A mirror that becomes bigger when I am far away from it. A mirror that shows me speaking another language. A mirror that feels like a twin.

This contains spoilers for The Last of Us season 2.

In a show where Cordyceps are destroying civilization, we must talk about the symbolism of immunity. Ellie is immune to the infection. Joel has developed an immunity to death and horror since his daughter’s passing. But neither of them is immune to loving someone or to the pain of losing them. When we see these seemingly unbreakable characters become vulnerable—when Ellie trembles after killing David and Joel calls Ellie “baby girl,” the nickname he once used for his daughter—the viewers become disarmed as well. That is why the morally ambiguous acts in The Last of Us feel more like tragedy than something to be strictly condemned. Joel is a double-edged sword embodying the moral complexity of an apocalyptic world. And his vulnerability to love and loss further sharpens that blade.

Pedro Pascal’s performance during the hospital killing spree felt chillingly realistic, as if Joel were on autopilot. It feels like a defense mechanism. While Joel can be relentless, he isn’t someone who kills without guilt. However, losing a loved one again was simply not an option for him. Unable to reconcile the colliding moral dilemmas, he completely disassociates the action from its consequences.

But consequences do follow, and accountability often comes after. Merciful or not, those who lost their loved ones to Joel ironically suffer the same trauma as him. The viewers who have been following Joel’s journey can understand Abby’s heart of vengeance because they empathized with his grief. We can assume that her father meant the world to her, just as Sarah and Ellie did to Joel.

This brings us to a question: does Joel deserve to die? My short answer is no. And I don’t believe The Last of Us frames him that way either. His death was one of the most horrific moments in television history. And while it was heartbreaking to see a beloved character go so brutally, the show makes clear just how cruel it is, even showing hesitation and tears among Abby’s own group.

Perhaps the greatest apocalypse Joel faced wasn’t the Cordyceps, or even the loss of Sarah and Tess. It was the belief that he himself deserved to die. Joel didn’t want to continue living after Sarah’s death, and after meeting Ellie, he lives on for her. His entire life became about Sarah and Ellie. Therefore, he could never forgive himself for losing Sarah—and Ellie, more emotionally—due to their conflict around the truth of the hospital incident. When he yelled, “Shut the f—k up and do it already,” sounding like he wasn’t afraid of death, I actually felt like he was letting go. He saw Jackson burning over the window. Yet when Ellie appeared, despite being in a critical state already, Joel showed the will to fight for life. And for Ellie, who had to witness this devastating moment, I take some miserable solace in this: that Joel’s last act wasn’t a surrender to death, but a resistance born of love.

I happend to come across an editorial written by Shin Hyung Chul in 2016.

It was a piece of writing talking about love and death through W. H. Auden’s poem Funeral Blues. The first stanza calls for silence, the second asks us to join, and the third and fourth speak of personal grief.

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead.'
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

To explain the strong impression of the third and fourth stanza, Shin recalled Hirano Keiichiro’s essay “What am I.” This Japanese novelist advises to people struggling to find a true self or people who call themselves a hypocrite because of their many masks: It is better to admit that there are a lot of versions of oneself. He says “one” is not an individual but various “versions” existing together. We don’t meet everyone as the same version of ourselves. We create selves that only come into being in front of certain people, and “one” is a collective of those. So Shin wrote:

In this regard, we can take a look at these incidents called love and death. To love someone is not just to love the person themselves, but also the relationship you have with them—and the version of yourself that relationship brings into existence. I like myself the most when I am with you. I love you because you make me live in that best version of me. Now we can understand why losing loved ones are so painful. To lose someone you love is to lose a version of yourself created for that person. The relationship that existed only with that person dies with them. Not being able to see them again means never being able to live as that version of yourself again.

With this theory in mind, we can understand the despair in the third and fourth stanza better. The thrid stanza shows that the lost person gave the stability and direction in the narrator’s life, as if confirming it by every word. There are a lot of versions of myself inside me. The reason why I can endure other painful and disillusioned relationships is because the version of myself with you existed. Just one version made it possible for other versions to live on as well. When the most important person to me dies, the most important version of myself also does. Your funeral is always my funeral. Therefore the latter of this poem is a word from someone who is doing their own funeral.

Because we don’t have the power over life and death as humans, we inevitably experience the loss and pain of our loved ones. There was a time when I was scared to love someone because it hurts so much. Losing a part of me has always been suffocating. But as Camus said, we must resist, although our existence is meaningless and we are all heading to death. The pull of love feels stronger than the fear of loss. If life is a resistance to death, love is a resistance to pain. So even with all the uncertainties, we choose to extend ourselves toward another.

Maybe I’ve gotten a bit too serious. I like myself when I am with you. I love you, who makes me live in that version of myself. So please stay with me as long as you can. That is the only thing I want from you.

Jojo Rabbit eloquently weaves together two themes—the politics of war and Jojo’s individual growth. (Then again, everything is political.) Introducing Hitler as Jojo’s imaginary friend was a clever device. It exposed the absurdity of Nazi ideology through the lens of a child. Just as children outgrow their imaginary friends, Jojo casts off imaginary Hitler as he begins to grasp the horrors of war and the value of human dignity.

Jojo is a ten-year-old who can’t even bring himself to kill a rabbit, hence the teasing nickname, “Jojo Rabbit.” He dreamed of becoming a strong Nazi soldier armored in metal and glory. But war turns out to be far more monstrous than heroic, and the Jewish girl hiding in his attic seems far too human to be the monster he was taught to fear. Gradually, Jojo realizes that the world isn’t what he was told it was. And he learns that the strongest thing in this world isn’t metal, dynamite, or brute strength. It was love.

When Jojo tells Elsa, “Jews love ugly things,” and then sees his own scarred reflection in the mirror, he asks imaginary Hitler if he’s ugly. Imaginary Hitler says yes without hesitation. Yet Elsa who is a supposed enemy, doesn’t care about Jojo’s scar at all. Jojo begins to understand that you can love and respect someone who’s different.

After the war ends, Jojo and Elsa step outside and dance, with David Bowie’s “Heroes” playing in the background. Jojo, once mocked for his timidity, was in fact brave enough to keep Elsa safe through it all. And Elsa, who spent the entire film confined in a small space, was the one to save Jojo from the narrow world once he believed in. Now these two truly deserve to be called heroes.

This is such a small thing, but I liked how you put your hands in your pants pockets when we went to eat Sujebi at Noryangjin a few days ago. I wonder why I liked that so much.

We became friends when we were eleven. We lived in the same old apartment complex and shared the name “지원.” We were almost the same height and looked alike that sometimes people thought we were sisters. We both loved art. You played the cello, and I made paintings. Like our shared name, we saw each other as our other selves.

Nothing in this world lasts forever, but I never once doubted that we would be best friends for life. And I still believe we are, even though you can’t hear me now, lying in a hospital bed. I don’t know how to accept this. I never imagined a future without you.

The last time we spoke, you said, “My whole body hurts so much,” over the phone when you were in Oakland and I was in Seoul. That was the last thing I heard from you. It still doesn’t make sense. We weren’t prepared for something like this. You are only twenty-three. And you will turn twenty-four in just two months.

I don’t even know what I should be angry at, but I am. It is so unfair. You are only twenty-three.

I cried over the phone last Wednesday. For some reason, hearing someone’s voice made me spill out even more. I don’t know why I called you. If I had been looking for emotional support, there were others I could have called. Even you have said that you lack empathy. And jokes aside it is quite true, you often come across as cold and dry from the outside. But perhaps that is why I called you. I wanted the most boring, ordinary kind of comfort from someone who seemed the least likely to offer it. I think I needed that.

After a good cry I felt much better. We ended the call laughing.

...

Today is April 14, 2025. I am in New Haven, reading this piece of writing from almost five years ago. I am still grateful that you picked up the phone and listened to me so patiently. I don’t remember the exact words I said. I wonder if you do. Weirdly I recall you saying that you grew a habbit of drinking a little bit of whiskey on the rock before going to bed. If you ever read this, thank you again.

The first time I felt the nausea was the winter of 2013 transitioning to 2014. Like Roquentin, I didn’t no why. Maybe it’s the winter, maybe it will get better in spring, I thought. But even when the flowers were in full bloom, nothing changed. For a brief moment each morning, I felt a fragile relief knowing that I was still alive. But the rest of the time I trembled with anxiety. The fact that there was no reason for my nausea felt like a dead end, and nothing seemed capable of curing that despair.

One day I was humming “Let It Be” by The Beatles while taking a shower. While Mother Mary didn’t come to me in that difficult time, my heart was submerged with the warmth of water. But that was it. As soon as I stepped outside of the shower, the nausea returned like a wave. I resented myself for not being able to believe in any god.

That was when I first encountered Sartre. Existence precedes essence was an immense consolation. It was the first sentence to tell me that “no reason” could simply be. It was the first to suggest that meaningless might not be an ending but a beginning.

The Nausea has not left me and I don't believe it will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.

The 18-year-old me kept praying on something, or anything, wishing the nausea would go away forever. Now I know that it is an inevitable part of my being. Sartre said he wrote Nausea for his own salvation, and that same frail, suffering human voice became a comfort to so many. It was heartbreakingly beautiful that the serenity I longed for didn’t come from the divine, but from other helpless people who were like me.

in:draft is Jeewon Kim's online space for half-private thoughts. When I’m not writing here, I design for a living and watch a lot of film & TV.