Year
In progress

Medium
Hand-drawn illustration · Photoshop

Audience
Ages 3–6

Status
Seeking publication

Picturebook series, in progress. Ages 3–6. Book 1 of 4.

가. began with a simple wish: that my research could be understood by anyone, even a child. Everything else I make asks how Hangul works as a designed structure. This book asks the same question, but quietly, as a story.

Hangul is built on a quiet idea. A consonant and a vowel are each incomplete, and become a syllable only by joining. In 가., that idea becomes two creatures. ㄱ is a giraffe who bends and angles, alone in a wide red land. ㅏ is a crane, tall and open, standing on the other side of the world. They find each other. They are different, very different, and for a moment ㄱ turns away. But the crane stays. And in staying, side by side as the sun sets, they make a sound neither could make alone: 가.

That is the whole of it, and it is also the whole of Hangul. A letter is not finished until it meets another. What I study as a system, a child here can simply feel: the difference between being alone and being together.

The book holds to a deliberate restraint, forty-four words in all, a line or two per spread, wide space, a muted desert palette. Every image is drawn by hand and finished in Photoshop, with no generative tools. For a book that places a child's first letters into their hands, that is the point. In a moment when text and images are increasingly made by machines, a story about how a writing system fits together felt like something a person should make, slowly and by hand.

가. is the first of four books, each pairing a consonant with ㅏ to build a syllable: 가, 나, 마, 아. The series is currently being developed for publication, with the goal of reaching young readers and their families.