The Color of Self-Love: A Creative Journey of Loneliness and Power
When I first started my photography project, "Love Like a Monster," it was all about documenting the Voidpunk counterculture in Hong Kong. I saw them as these incredible artists and outcasts who were reclaiming their identities after being dehumanized. Initially, my work was focused on them, on their story. But underneath it all, I was struggling with a profound loneliness and a lack of self-love. It was a pain I carried, and without fully acknowledging it, I was at risk of falling into a cycle of suffering.
Then came a turning point in Sarah Blesener's class at the International Center of Photography. We read an excerpt from Audre Lorde’s Eye to Eye, where she makes a crucial distinction: pain is an event you can recognize and use, while suffering is the "nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain." This struck a chord with me. My loneliness was that pain. The class became a space to finally recognize and use it, to transform it into something powerful instead of letting it become suffering.
This was also when I connected with James Baldwin's essay, "The Creative Process." He writes that the artist must cultivate a state that most people must avoid: being alone. He clarifies that this isn't just a physical aloneness, but the more profound aloneness of birth, suffering, or death. He argues that while society works to create a bulwark against chaos, the artist's role is to illuminate the "great wilderness of himself" so that we, as a society, don't lose sight of the purpose of making the world a more human place. I realized my project was not just about the Voidpunks, but about my own struggle to navigate the wilderness of myself.
My own journey of transformation started with a color. In our last class with Sarah, she didn't ask her usual question about which color we were that day. This made me think even more deeply about the color I would have chosen: electric blue. It was odd, as I'd always associated blue with sadness, but this particular shade felt vibrant and powerful, full of crazy happy energy. It's almost serendipitous that Sarah's work about her brother dives into the color blue as well. It made me wonder if she was meant to come into my life to help me see my own truth.
Self portrait. September 2025.
This color kept reappearing in unexpected ways. When I reviewed my experimental images from Sarah’s class—the ones I made to represent "glow" and "sparkles"—I noticed my favorite inverted negatives were that exact electric blue. The elements I had photographed were not this color; the inversion process had created it. It was as if the color was emerging from within the work itself, guiding me.
The connections became even more personal. I remembered one of my favorite electric blue shirts and the day my mom saw me in it. She told me, "This is your color, you look gorgeous," and we took a selfie together. Then, I remembered my ancestors' divine deities, who were consistently portrayed with blue bodies in archival paintings and images. The color wasn't just a random choice; it was part of my personal history and identity.
Working with the Voidpunks, we used these threads to create my first Voidsona (Voidpunk persona.) We found a portrait by David LaChapelle where the model's body was painted blue, and this became our mood board. For the first time, my project wasn't just about documenting others—it was about me. I realized that my journey from loneliness to self-love was the true subject all along, inspired by the very people I was documenting.
This whole process was a radical act of looking inward, something that connects directly to the ideas of Melissa Febos and James Baldwin. Febos, in her essay "In Praise of Navel-Gazing," champions personal narrative as a brave and necessary act. She argues that writing about oneself and one's body is a tool for transformation. My self-portraiture is my own way of "navel-gazing"—an acknowledgment that my story is valid and that telling it is a necessary part of my artistic and personal growth. Baldwin states that the "war of an artist with his society is a lover's war", and that the artist's role is to "reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real". The Voidpunks gave me the courage to see myself as a divine entity, and through this process, I've truly found my own "monster" and learned to love it.
