Prologue of my life

I remember that I first met with Fine Arts when I was a kindergarten student. I liked going outside, drawing pictures and making anything with various materials. In addition, watching American animation films, I used to draw characters appearing in the film. My enthusiasm and love for fine arts that started from that time naturally led to entering Sunhwa Arts High School in Korea. Sunhwa Arts High School is an arts high school in Korea that fosters young artists, having the best arts education environment in Korea. At the school, I mainly learned painting and design, and started to agonize what I want to do.

When I was a 1st grader of high school, for the first time, I had a class of making clay animation with friends. It was a very fresh experience to compose a story with friends, design characters, make them with soil and then create animation by taking pictures with a camera one by one. Therefore, after knowing that I can express what I want to speak through animation, I became all the more interested in the genre of animation. In addition, the works of my practical skill teacher who was majoring in the Dept of Sculpture in Seoul National University and was famous for Independent short clay animation in Korea influence me much. And I saw various genres' animations in animation festivals. While seeing variety of animation work, I became to have a mind hoping that someday I also would be able to show my animation work on the screen in front of many people and give them deep impression. In order to settle my curiosity of animation, I went to a library and searched for books about clay animation.

I was very impressed after reading Nick Park's writing, “Clay animation aesthetics come from ruggedness that we can feel from animators' words in the film". Nick Park is the director of Wallace & Gromit that I saw much during my childhood. When our work was completed and we saw it together with friends, I was very happy because of the fact that I made animation and felt the beauty and grandeur coming from one image. Having growing passion for animation, I saw Korean director of Dreamworks, Jennifer Yuh Nelson's <Kung Fu Panda 2> when I was a 2nd grader in a high school. And I thought that I want to become a Korean woman director in the US animation market. But in Sunhwa Arts High School, there wasn't a curriculum of learning animation and while drawing pictures for a Korean university entrance, my vision for the future became blurred. There wasn't any university where I wanted to study animation, and as the result of fierce competition for entering a university, at last I entered the Dept of Ceramics, Kyunghee University. As a freshman in Kyunghee University, I spent hard days wandering my future course in my mind.

In the meantime, I watched the short animations from Ringling college and I first became to know about Ringling college. So the thought that I would certainly do animation anyway caught me. In addition, seeing many world famous American animation directors who graduated from Ringling college. Therefore, I came in the states and decided to learn at Ringling.