AfterThoughts
This is an ongoing project in which each chapter takes one philosophical text as its starting point and turns it into paintings, with sound, technology and movement. 'AfterThoughts' is about pinning down what matters and giving it visual form. Meeting friends who live in different countries, with different lifestyles and aims, she has come to feel that something is missing. She feels that the life we have built leaves us much less space to question our lives, what we really care about, and who we want to be. Life keeps pulling us away from thinking about such questions. 'AfterThoughts' brings these missing pieces forward, the ones we lose when we are overwhelmed by busyness, hectic schedules and competitive interactions. She believes that this project can encourage us to make more space and time to revisit what we really value.
The project name, 'AfterThoughts', has several meanings. What comes to your mind with a different perspective over time can be your afterthoughts. Or it can be the thoughts that come directly after a certain concept or conversation. Or it can be your state or your being after you have gone through many different ways of thinking. All these meanings are part of the core of the project. This project can open up conversations with people who help you refresh your perspective, give you more time to refine your thoughts, and let those thoughts make you more of the person you want to be. Her art wants to speak to anyone who needs the beauty of walking a path that is slow-paced yet inwardly challenging, calm yet firm, valuable yet demanding patience. 'After Liberty' is the first chapter she is opening with, and further chapters will follow from her reading of Boethius, Marcus Aurelius and Zhuangzi.
This is an ongoing project in which each chapter takes one philosophical text as its starting point and turns it into paintings, with sound, technology and movement. 'AfterThoughts' is about pinning down what matters and giving it visual form. Meeting friends who live in different countries, with different lifestyles and aims, she has come to feel that something is missing. She feels that the life we have built leaves us much less space to question our lives, what we really care about, and who we want to be. Life keeps pulling us away from thinking about such questions. 'AfterThoughts' brings these missing pieces forward, the ones we lose when we are overwhelmed by busyness, hectic schedules and competitive interactions. She believes that this project can encourage us to make more space and time to revisit what we really value.
The project name, 'AfterThoughts', has several meanings. What comes to your mind with a different perspective over time can be your afterthoughts. Or it can be the thoughts that come directly after a certain concept or conversation. Or it can be your state or your being after you have gone through many different ways of thinking. All these meanings are part of the core of the project. This project can open up conversations with people who help you refresh your perspective, give you more time to refine your thoughts, and let those thoughts make you more of the person you want to be. Her art wants to speak to anyone who needs the beauty of walking a path that is slow-paced yet inwardly challenging, calm yet firm, valuable yet demanding patience. 'After Liberty' is the first chapter she is opening with, and further chapters will follow from her reading of Boethius, Marcus Aurelius and Zhuangzi.

Last December, she read John Stuart Mill's 『On Liberty』, and it brought the vague questions in her head into sharper focus. Although it was published back in 1859, many parts of what he wrote about individuality, freedom, the need for diverse environments, individual development and the dangers of the tyranny of the majority caused a shift inside her. These ideas might seem obvious today, but reading them felt like a fist knocking on the doors of the society she inhabits, the environment that shaped her and the mindset she had always held.



The emotional impact of these passages led her to abstract visualisation combined with music composition and other media. Each painting in the 'After Liberty' series is based on specific passages from 『On Liberty』, and takes its title from Mill's own words or messages. She paints the emotional response each passage provoked in her. The passage is shown alongside the painting it inspired, so viewers can understand where the image comes from.


『On Liberty』 was the starting point where art and philosophy met for her. Examining these philosophical messages, reflecting on them and discussing them is no longer just about finding inspiration or material for her art, but is becoming an essential foundation of her life.

"Where, not the person’s own character, but the traditions or customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress."

"Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual, or the family, do not ask themselves — what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or What would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? (...)"

"Human beings owe to each other help to distinguish the better from the worse, and encouragement to choose the former and avoid the latter. (...) But neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it. (...)"

"He is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument; but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it. (...)"
Each sketch is inspired by the passage from the book 『On Liberty』(1859) by John Stuart Mill.












Sketch drawings, acrylic & oil pastel on paper