“Daycare Simulation”, Yujin Suh 2023

The artwork “Daycare Simulation” targets the idea of lucid dreaming and the concept of reality versus the imaginary world. The painting indicates a girl having a picnic with her fantasy friends, but also stipulates a discomfiting facial expression and physical position that gives off a “captured” feeling. The imaginary space represents the girl’s dream world, meaning that she is stuck in her own universe of lucid dreams. As her imaginary friends distract her in this strange place, there is also an aged door at the back of the scenery. This door is to represent the borders that separate reality and dream, which then can connect to the action of the imaginary friends trying to restrict her from leaving this dream world. The painting therefore depicts the fear of not being able to escape their own imagination and being trapped within their own mind forever. Subsequently, the painting advocates for teenagers who find trouble within social interactions and use their imaginations to create their own world of society to avoid the trouble that they face in reality. In the painting, this backfires as her imaginary friends overpowers the owner of the imaginary world and prevents her from returning home ever again.

Yujin Suh is an 11th grade student at Seoul Foreign School located in Seoul, Korea. Her major focus in art relates to painting with social aspects. She uses her fine arts skills into using various media such as watercolor, oil painting, acrylics and more. Her recent accomplishments are Innovator Award at the Conrad Challenge and High Merit award at 2021 Celebrating Art Fall. Yujin plans to continue her work in art and literature to build her future.