2024.121
I go to Frieze New York ftft and you would think that preview opening night would at least be some fun even if you're surrounded by recycled art from other fairs last year but no. I walk through well-dressed twenty something year olds saying I got one of these at home and distressed gallery directors on the phone: Oui oui j'expliquée c'est tellement importante! The Shed is just an airport mall with a vibrating bench. (There really was a vibrating bench) At least the couple who fucked in Battery Park didn't pretend to have good taste!


2024.118
Not just a cold sore but also a small infection (or scratch maybe) inside my mouth which hurts & I can't get overtime out of my head after the knower show. It's catchy & sounds complex & casual at the same time but the reality is having someone who makes your heart work overtime makes a difficult life. I know I'm not growing if I'm not crying but what if he only likes me for his own growth. She was what I needed then. No!NO!NO!!!!NO!!!!!NO!!!! & I disappear slowly because my body is tired of my heart working relentlessly & I am covered in cold sores all over my body until the little blisters swallow each other & turn into a big balloon that just pops. 


2024.117
Have a vicious cold sore on my lower lip and despite noticing it early and applying cream faithfully it's taking its natural course of getting worse. I am not kissable and it's like finding out you're allergic to air. I've been sleeping less than 6 hours everyday this week. Painting until 1 AM and going to the gym at 6:30 AM. I've never felt more happy until this cold sore creeped up and said I needed more sleep. If I don't stay up late and wake up early to do things that make me productive I'll get stressed out and still get a cold sore though. How do I let the body know to just fucking listen me when I say it's all good. What is the point of youth if I can't abuse it a little. 


2024.114
On my way back to the gym i feel happy because I have a painting I want to keep working on. But I can't touch it because I have to go to work. Maybe I should try a slow dry medium but is there a medium that doesn't make the paint thinner? Oh to have time to stick around while the painting dries. I can give up my left pinky for that. And lack of time makes me impatient. I used to not be like this but nowadays I get fixated on one painting rather than work on multiple paintings at once. Which is very bad because I get excessively frustrated when the painting isn't working out. PMS and a bad painting habit feed each other and make me hurt my own feelings.


2024.111
Some poets I follow on twitter are losing their minds over Taylor Swift's new album. It's embarrassing to see amazing writers foaming at the mouth defending their high and mighty job title "Poet." Louise Glück was probably sick and tired of these kinds of writers when she said no one actually is a poet– only writers who aim to be poets which is unachievable. But also I'm acting high and mighty referencing Louise Glück and being sanctimoniously neutral about Taylor Swift. I'm this way because recently I've been feeling embarrassed whenever I talk shit about anything. Bad paintings, cringe writings, train not coming, people who think we're friends, Ice Spice, deadbeat ex, etc. I feel embarrassed because [A] it shows that I have a lot of wack things in my life which probably means I'm a wack person in some way [B] makes me feel immature for not being able to keep my negative opinions to myself [C] who am I to fucking criticize anything. Honestly, I'd be willing to give up something important if I could lose all my appetite for bitching. It'd be cooler if I was rageful rather than just a bit pissed off but I'm scared of getting seriously angry, which just shows I'm too indolent to handle real emotions. 

& again this entry is also a whole lot of bitching so let me write one thing I appreciate: Post Malone looks really good in the Taylor Swift music video. 


2024.109
Saw a comment on a Renoir painting: Estrogen. I'm so in love. (not with that comment although I think it's spot on.) Today I walk and live like everything is going to be okay. All the things bad and sad that happened and all the bad decisions I made based on the bad and sad feel forgiven. Not by me or by anyone with the authority to forgive anything but it's a feeling. It's like I've been told "you broke the rules but you didn't hurt anybody." I didn't have a dream last night or a sudden death of anxious catastrophizing so I don't know why. Maybe I'm finally growing out of tragedy as a requirement for beauty. Maybe I have my head screwed on straight now and I look at what's in front of me. Maybe it's because the books I ordered finally shipped. Maybe I really, really want to stop worrying and it's satisfying to accept that. Maybe it's because I go home in 5 minutes. Maybe I'm really in love.


2024.108
I look at Frans Hals paintings drinking nespresso. There's such radical acceptance to giving no way out to an ugly face in a painting. If their cheeks are oddly flushed and fleshy, gooey red yogurt-y paint is what they're getting. It's not the painter's job to beautify ugly things so looking at beautified things lead to prettier paintings I guess. My mom said she looked at pictures of pretty girls when she was pregnant with me. Unfortunately my mom is not an artist. 

Also differentiating oatmilk creamer and creamy oatmilk is splitting hair. Like a footjob and a LDR. Distinction without a difference. 


2024.107
Something weird is happening to my skin– light red irritations on my hands, hips, and arms. I don't know if they were always there and I'm just now noticing them. Makes me feel neurotic because I think these marks are probably harmless but I don't believe myself about that. Probably not a big deal but also what if it is. 

My mom says going to the gym three times a week is so meaningless and I don't know what to do about that because I definitely can't go everyday. Or maybe I can but I really can't. There's nothing worse than working out so hard that you have to take a nap. If I wanted to nap I would just have a drink.

I haven't watched Dune or SATC or Friends or OITNB and it's been years since I said I will catch up someday and I realize now I might never catch up because I've almost entirely lost the ability to sit and watch something for more than 2 hours without doing anything else or feeling fomo for not doing anything else. What if I can never ever relate to that part of pop culture and have no cool tv shows to speak of when my mouth is wrinkly.


2024.104
Want:
1. painting of Sydney Sweeney

2. coquette tramp stamp


2024.103
I run on the treadmill listening to abcdefu by Gayle and the joy of not dating a bad artist strikes me in the head. Working at a gallery means I have to look at a good amount of works that suck. I'm pretty lucky to see a lot of nice paintings at my job but work is still work. It's not always fresh or consistently impressive. Now imagine if this was a relationship. You don't get paid, you don't get to build a community, and you don't get to go to HR and report unwanted sexual attention. (Oh, the artist says I'm blueballing him by refusing sex!) All while having to maintain game face in front of his thoughtless, craft-less bundle of shallow historical references and bro trauma.
Whatever integrity you thought you had about your logic, your sharp sensitivity to form, color, light, and scale, your skill to synthesize a visual experience into language, and your ability to elevate the sensation of your optical nerves to a spiritual event, are bruised, to say the least. Once you say out loud in your own words lies about the impact of "Art," especially with the intention to comfort or let-down-gently, you are no longer a reliable viewer or speaker of your artistic experiences. Your self trust crumbles and you realize no man is worth that so you dump him. Then you rebuild all over the house in your mouth, and the guts, to let out sentiments like "It's ass" at the sight of pretentious pictures. So I feel joyous and free running like a dog listening to a pop song. 


2024.102
The weather is nothing but a Renoir landscape and I love the big window at the gallery being open. (How deciduous is sadness in great weather!) Finally it's a sunny day like a bright apple and I listen to some desperate love songs walking through the park. I walk the same path I walked yesterday when I talked on the phone with B about vibrators.

I go to close the window because the wind feels colder as I sit still for a while. I see the Longfield painting I haven't really paid attention to and the red gushing out from under the grays is attractive. In some abstract paintings the shapes are vague stimuli for some specificity we remember. In some other abstract paintings, the shapes remind us of nothing which is great strangeness to the brain, because there is no greater comfort than to recognize. The shapes in this painting relate to nothing, at least inside the limited visual library of my brain. So I latch on to the bloodiness of the painting and make enormous assumptions. She might've been blood-coughing-sick with love when she painted it! How marvelous I get to have this encounter on a day like this!


2024.101
A guy walks into the gallery and says he doesn't get it. I ask him why. He says this: "I think about female chefs when I see this. See, I'm a bad boy. I don't understand these things." 

I am tired (despite good sleep), lonely (despite good people in my life), seriously irritable (despite guava croissant), and anxious (despite nothing actually). I try my best not to appear sulky at work. Photographer filming the content for a big painting debut is not helping me. He calls me Mica and I correct him that's the school I went to, not my name. I stand in front of the camera staring at the two naked asses Diebenkorn painted. He tells me to marry a hedge fund guy if I want to live like these uptown girls. God bless his daughter. 

I miss when I wasn't embarrassed about the way I live my life. I'm not sure if there actually was a time like that because there is always something very ugly about survival. S said to me before that being a painter is like being a priest– once you feel that calling, you have no strength to resist it. It's hard to explain this to most people and perhaps I lack the beauty of practicality. Sadly this lack cringes me today. 


2024.99
A and I watch Coherence and it frightens me that we choose to watch this the night before the solar eclipse. I act like a bitch because I hate this you-are-your-own-enemy type of mystery so steadily maintaining its level of scariness for 90 minutes. The movie sort of unravels itself in the last 20 minutes. Multiple versions of ourselves– from darkness to light– live in different universes of reality and make different choices according to our reality and personality. I tell A I feel like I'm being blackmailed by another version of me all the time. He laughs. 

I decide not to go to Seattle with A next week. My life is moving slowly and I don't want to slow it down even more. I see him dreading this trip and that makes me want to come along. There there baby. But I feel stupid trying to make time for something I don't know how to enjoy. 


2024.98
There is a sense of comfort that comes from establishing the banality of my existence and the choices I make consciously and subconsciously. An aspiring artist gallery girl, an asian girl dating a white boy, an awkward 5'6 mousy hair brunette, etc, etc. It soothes me in a way that being part of a sorority or a band would by providing a sense of belonging, or a mild assurance that whatever I'm doing is not a mistake, and if it is, it's a shared crime among us. Still, there is an irreversible grotesqueness of this realization– that there's nothing about me that is unique or complex enough to be called different. Of course, there is no way that what I've experienced so far in life is unique to me. And I'm nothing but the collection of events I've run into, media I've consumed, and people I've kept or tossed. Despite what I believe I could synthesize within myself after common experiences, I end up the same as most people, making the same choices. Even my desire to feel special is no different from what others want. 

K stops by my desk at the gallery with her baby. I realize how surreal it is to try to communicate with someone who can't talk. I thought 7-months-olds could talk but I was wrong. The kid has this sparkly, wide-eyed stare that I can't resist at all. She's got some hair sprouting on top of her head and her lips are wet because she doesn't really know how to close her mouth and I think it's the prettiest thing I've seen. Feels wrong to think I want this kind of presence in my life– to associate something as magical as a child with what "I" want. I want K to bring her around more. 

I write up some stuff about artists for upcoming fairs and it's very easy to write about people who've already been written about so much. There's very little pressure to be diplomatic or knife-blade-precise because that's already been done by people with much more authority than me. It's fun to sneak in some opinionated inspections. I see A's text from a party I couldn't go to. He texts me like we have to organize a time to meet and I think he is drunk. I feel like this distance between us is unnecessary. Why am I writing stupid booth proposals?  


2024.97
Feeling pathetic as carbonated grapefruit-flavored water drizzles down my chin and onto my unwashed sweater that had been sitting on A's couch for a week. I could describe myself as splendidly clumsy from a more self-accepting point of view. The earthquake is not to blame for my clumsiness and I'm not about to con myself into the convenient anecdote of  "the earthquake made me reconsider my past choices." I'm just excited to see many texts from people about it and I send the same response to everybody. 

Planning for travel is not working out very well. It's very true that you won't know how to play if you've never played before. (I actually don't know if this is a Korean saying or an American thing.) How do you plan for travel if you haven't traveled? It really irritates me though, the possibility of greatness, and by greatness I mean a romantic getaway, dangling in my mind which anyone with some capability of imagination can also see. I'm also quite sure there are people with much more elaborate capacity for neuro-visionboarding than me. I'm starting to think that travel is maybe not what I get to have/give to myself unless it involves some kind of problem-solving, or functions as a temporary solution for problems that could never be fixed. By this I mean traveling to see my mother and maternal grandparents for the first time in 5 years while being childishly bitter and still unsure if I care how I'm perceived. 

Alas, it is great to have in my possession LF's first monograph, signed. At the bookstore, the way my palms were sweating reminded me of that video of girls in front of Justin Bieber's house being told to get lost, and they ask if they can get a hug. 


2024.95
I wake up sweating because I remember in my sleep (i don't categorize this as a dream because there was no distortion from what actually happened) the time I gave my ex "White Fragility." It sounds funny metaphorically but it's a title of a book. I drag myself out of bed with so much discontent that I have to get out of bed. I go to the gym and that makes me feel like I'm not a failure. 

The thing with the rain is there are so many worms in central park and I have to look down the whole time to make sure I'm not stepping on them. Not just to avoid killing them but also to avoid further crushing the worm corpses. They look like small intestines unraveled on the street and the cobblestones are a scene of massacre. As who I am in the present is a pile of me from every second of the past, I don't want the future me to carry the burden of having stepped on worms. 


2024. 93-94
I buy Sylvia Plath's journal from Barnes and Noble after MoMA with Lauren. I seriously wonder how much money I would've saved if I'd bought a kindle a year ago. I read a line where she describes a German guy describing Frank Sinatra– very moonlight night, ja? Makes me smile so I buy. She also writes that the only thing better than being young and sound and a virgin on a beautiful night is being raped. I explain to Lauren she means it's worse to be lonely than to be raped. The horrendous influence Sylvia Plath had on women to mislabel their cursed sense of humor as a symptom of depression. But I can just see myself lying at the beach and finishing this book. 

On my way to work I walk through central park and regardless of whatever real new yorkers have to say about strawberry fields, I cannot get myself to remember another pathway that doesn't go through strawberry fields. My head is spinning and my right hip hurts all of a sudden and I think in these precise words, "Oh, why the fuck is my butt hurting?" And the birds, the drizzle, the buildings I see through the trees don't really stick to my mind as an image. Maybe because from the moment I see I decided what I'm seeing is not worth painting. Although I always, ALWAYS, think about what Kim said– there is no such thing as a trivial subject, only trivial perspectives. I might be able to memorize another way to go across the park if I don't lean into my propensity for language. Writing and painting are different jobs and one who cannot authoritatively distinguish these two ways of information consuming/stimulation processing/obsessively explaining makes a lousy painter. And/or a lousy writer. 

Additionally a bit hung up on what B said about A: "He seems pretty decisive about you." It's one of those things that sound too good to actually be happy about.  


2024.91
I woke up feeling a bit like shit dreading I had a hair appointment. I have not been to a hair salon in four years and feel embarrassed. I did a lot of amateur cutting and dyeing my hair in college because I couldn't afford a salon. Now that I'm generating legal income I feel it's reasonable to begin the search for a salon that will not ruin my life either by taking away too much of the only thing that prevents me from looking like a teenage boy or by persuading me to buy a lifetime supply of leave-in-conditioners. 
 
I go to a place in East Village although no one personally recommended it. It was the only place available for appointments on Easter Sunday. The hairdresser says my bangs are cute and I tell her I trim them with nail scissors every month. A good chunk of my hair is cut off and I think of Domenico Gnoli's hair paintings. Also Sasha Gordon's braids. Whenever I receive any beauty service, I feel like I'm taking myself too seriously. What about me cares for polished nails, a hairless body, or a structured haircut? I refuse to discuss deservingness after all the therapy. I hate the attention I pay to myself because it's vain but self-portraits aren't painting themselves.

I should remember to paint my cheese grater. 


2024.88
Finished painting Kate Moss's tits this morning. Not because I want to paint her per se but because I want to paint small tits that look bigger from being in a small frame. Something about nipples showing through thin fabric is much hotter than bare nipples. Makes me think about what Jenna Gribbon said about painting nipples with neon pink. Whatever used to be sexy is not sexy anymore in the culture of sensory overload and endless consumption of visual experience. I think being a painter can feel like being a porn addict.

At the gallery I'm wearing a bodysuit and tights and whenever I go to the bathroom I think that I am being unfair to myself drinking as much water as I do. I meet X and I think about how I would feel if someone said, "Hi I really like some of your works," and decide against saying shit like that. I attend a webinar about galleries supporting women artists, and gallerists are eager to defend the stuff they sell as good art, not good women's art. "Intellectually relevant art" is the worst thing I heard all week. 

I'm doing another poetry workshop with Kim in April and I feel very socially adequate and bravely poetic to participate in this kind of therapy where we collectively decide feelings aren't shit unless articulated through non-elitist craft. What do I do with all this museum-worker-has-an-affair-with-donor-twenty-years-her-senior references I've consumed in my free time.


2024.87
I hate negotiating. I hate the idea of it, I hate doing it, I hate planning for it. How is it fair to be raised to require nothing from anybody only to be forced into adulthood and speak of what I deserve. Seems like there is no money in the market for art workers but so much for artworks. Or are we just trying to make it so cool to spend so much on things that'll never talk back. Gosh but if you buy her something from ABHK she might kiss you back. 
​
It's almost the end of March and the muddiness of the weather is irritating me. How tardy is spring. It's like getting excited for a man who would just piss all over my feelings. 
 

2024.86
I keep thinking about vacation and what that would mean if there was no rest involved. I don't seek for active resting but also what is the point of suffering. Forgot about my mom's birthday last weekend and due to difference in time zone, I ended up texting her a whole day late. Wished her a happy birthday week and she said she couldn't wait for me to confirm the dates I'll be coming home. 
 
At dinner with A I run my mouth about a non-date date I had– Facetime with an Australian lawyer who turned me off very much with his accent while accusing me of flirting with him over the phone. Why do I do this. Talking about things that are the opposite of gravy. Although I'd rather not go into detail about my bland fantasies about a magical vacation. We could get out of New York for a bit and ride a vespa or something. Look at Giotto. Eat oranges and swim. But who says that, like, Let's go to Florence? 
​
The lyft that picked me up this morning was a white tesla. I'd never been in a tesla before and I prefer the subway. Lauren thinks women in NYC are all getting punched in the face. I fear something like that too but usually I worry about being perceived as needy, or as wanting something everyone else also wants. Or making a painting that I love painting but not looking at.
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2024.82
Just finished anonymizing the names in my unpublished blog. Most of them are anonymized except the people that I love. Not sure if or when I'll actually publish it. Cowardice and factual writing are hard to separate. Although I find writing in this format much easier than twitter since I have trouble coming up with one-line-bangers. I look up to Susan Sontag for electing easy English to write about feminism. 
​
I feel much less desire to write about work since my work has been good. And most importantly receptive to being a good work environment. I started this blog to keep a record of things, which I still doubt if it's a genius fucking thing to do, but now I feel content that I can lean into more private matters like the fact that I pre-ordered Olivia Rodrigo's red tank top merch after shamelessly stalking some girl's Threads because her Instagram was private. 
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My new year's resolution to drink less than 2 cups of caffeinated beverages a day has been flexibly adjusted to 3. Mostly for my morning gym days where I drink a Redbull around 6 AM and still require a morning & afternoon coffee. Also I am cutting out processed sugar in order to look better.