My training began in painting, where I learned to see form first: color, composition, and structure before subject. I carried that way of seeing into graduate study in graphic design, then into years of practice as a designer in New York, and later into teaching. For most of that time I studied English as pure form, treating letters as shapes to be measured, spaced, and composed.

Hangul, my first language, I had always read rather than seen. It was communication, not form. It was simply the language I came from.

That changed in 2017, in my father's study. My father spent his life in communication and images, and that room was full of them; it was also, in its way, where I first learned to look. There I opened a book that had belonged to our family, our Yoo ancestors, its pages set in both Hangul and Classical Chinese. The smell of the old paper pulled me somewhere far back, into a lineage I had never really looked at. And in a book about where I came from, I saw Hangul as if for the first time: not as language, but as structure. Consonants shaped from the body that speaks them. Vowels built from a few elemental strokes. Syllables set as modular blocks within a square field. The writing system I had read my whole life revealed itself as a generative visual system, a script built from rule and repetition, and at the same moment, as something that was mine.

I have been following that thread ever since, across whatever medium the work asks for. In vector, Hangul becomes rule and pattern. By hand, it becomes something to pass to children. In generative code, it becomes a system that organizes itself. Underneath all of it is the same pull I felt in my father's study: a writing system that is at once designed structure and inheritance, and a question about what that structure still means in an age when text is generated by machines.