Hosan Kim, United States

As an artist, I am drawn to the emotional undercurrents that shape everyday life — longing, memory, isolation, and fleeting moments of peace. My work is grounded in personal experience, but it reaches beyond autobiography to touch something more universal.

I often feel like I’m walking between two worlds — Korean and American, past and future, expectation and desire. That in-between space is where most of my artwork lives. It’s where I painted Hand of the Tides, imagining myself sitting on a beach I haven’t reached yet. In real life, everything felt uncertain. But in that painting, there’s wind, waves, light, and a version of me that feels completely free. That dream keeps me going.

I create art not to escape reality, but to gather its broken parts and arrange them gently, so that even pain becomes something meaningful, something that points toward healing. If someone looks at my work and thinks, I’ve felt that, too, then my art has done its job. That connection, that shared recognition, is the most human form of tesserae I know.

Hosan Kim is a writer and visual artist from Southern California and a junior at Crean Lutheran High School. He explores memory, identity, and everyday moments through both words and drawings. When he is not writing or sketching, he enjoys discovering new stories in the world around him.