The Journey of Hollow Kiho is an animated tale that follows Kiho, a traveler who is born with a hollow forehead that continually spews a thick thought stream. After being chased off by a darker embodiment of herself, she is forced to travel worlds in search of a new place to call home or face the dire consequences of facing her past against Nox. The worlds are filled with what Kiho calls “SYKE” which illustrates a fulfilled being settled in their world. Walking through the exhibit you see the story of Kiho’s 23rd jump as she is transported into a world where trees seem to grow realistic limp legs. While resting in an abandoned home in the woods, Kiho reminisces about her original home and how her flight from her land led her to where she is today. She is alarmed when the portal wakes up and Kiho’s mind immediately flees the forest, darting away to a SYKE city where she barges into a small soup stop to hide from her encroacher but finds that she already knows that Kiho is here. Placed on the floor next to the projected animation is a television monitor with tattered shoes dropped next to the monitor. The screen showcases a compilation of Kiho trapped in an abstract in-between world. The animation installation showcases a trapped subspace where she is transported into another world, acting as if the television screen was what jumped Kiho into the animated projection.

I find that many of my inspirations have challenged my understanding of how I should approach my work. While these reassessments can get difficult, these new ideas open opportunities to create something unimaginable to me and have always guided me out of those challenging blocks. For the longest time, I was too scared to add features or characteristics to drawings depicting people as it would cement how I looked at the world. Expressions became a chore and accomplishments were compared and broken. I find myself breaking my drawings rather than improving them, searching for the glitch within the system, and using it to my advantage. I witness many artists and professionals grasp onto a recognizable style, while I am someone who can’t hold on to their style. This frustration is what led me to create a character that had a hole in its face and became the catalyst of how I approached the majority of my characters. The hole became a placeholder for what is yet to come, and I grew to see this spot as a sign of hope for when I attain a style and seal the pit.

The purpose of Journey of Hollow Kiho is to reflect on how I struggle to create work. The main character Kiho expresses two people, myself and my sister. While my sister is not a digital artist like myself, she has endured harder internal struggles than I have. This journey not only mirrors my struggles in life and in creative situations, but it also tells the story of how my sister has endured these pains and has reached her end goal. While I will never know her true story, I can tell as her little brother that she has achieved her goal. The other characters have their purpose in this life as well. Nox represents my self-hatred for the work and tends to catch up to my ambition to create and crush it. The SYKE act as those who have completed their goals and have their style, they represent the people I look up to and those artists I aspire to be. The exhibit itself showcases the television on the floor where Kiho is trapped in this dreamscape before jumping into the projected world. This trapped feeling is the uninspired hellscape I endure before each artistic adventure, where ideas tend to die or where ideas are sparked but fizzle out before reaching a conclusion. It’s a frustrating void that I find myself in more often than not and it becomes the box that I need to break in order to seal the pit of my character.

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