#172 - Eunju Park - Healing the Wounds of Suicide

Eunju Park is a visionary Hanji artist from Korea who transforms the traditional craft of paper-making into a profound medium for emotional restoration. Hanji, a resilient and beautiful traditional Korean paper, serves as the foundation for her unique creative process where she meticulously tears and assembles the material to form intricate Korean letters. These characters are not merely linguistic symbols but are vessels for deeply held positive messages intended to resonate with the viewer’s soul. Through her art, Eunju bridges the gap between ancient heritage and contemporary healing, inviting us into a world where the act of creation is a deliberate step toward light and resilience.

The genesis of Eunju’s artistic journey is rooted in a profound personal tragedy: the loss of her father to suicide nine years ago. At the time, she was a young mother of two, and the weight of unresolved grief eventually manifested as a deep depression that began to fracture her personal relationships. It was during this period of darkness that she discovered the music of BTS, whose themes of self-love and hope reignited her creative spark. Choosing Hanji allowed her to reconnect with her Korean identity while finding a tactile way to process her sorrow. By tearing the paper, she found she could deconstruct her pain, and by assembling it into uplifting words, she began to reconstruct her own life, turning a legacy of loss into a vibrant practice of cultural preservation and personal survival.

Eunju’s experience with depression and mental health was marked by a painful realization of how her internal struggle affected her family, creating a household atmosphere of tension and guilt. In a culture where mental health often carries a heavy stigma and her father's death was shrouded in silence, she had to find the courage to take responsibility for her own healing. She discovered that while grief must be felt, one cannot remain in it forever; art became the vehicle that allowed her to move from self-pity to self-love. By sharing her story openly, she breaks the traditional silence surrounding mental illness, offering her journey as a testament to the fact that finding a passion, something that "lights you up" is a vital tool for sustaining long-term mental well-being.

Through this intersection of tragedy and craft, Eunju’s understanding of the purpose of life has evolved into a mission of radical acceptance and the spreading of hope. She no longer sees life as a series of events to be controlled, but as a journey to be accepted, a perspective further solidified by her recent diagnosis of leukemia. Her art serves as a visual reminder that even when we cannot change our circumstances, we can change our internal response to them. When people encounter her work, Eunju hopes they feel the same profound sense of comfort that she felt during her recovery, realizing through the delicate textures of Hanji that hope is not just a feeling, but a choice that can be beautifully and tangibly expressed.

In conclusion, Eunju Park’s work stands as a powerful bridge between the fragility of the human experience and the enduring strength of the spirit. By weaving her father’s memory, her battle with depression, and her cultural heritage into every fiber of her Hanji pieces, she offers the world a roadmap for turning vulnerability into a source of universal inspiration. Her story reminds us that while we may be torn by life’s hardships, we have the power to reassemble ourselves into something even more meaningful. Eunju’s art is a gift of "radical acceptance," proving that within the characters of a language and the texture of a paper, one can find the courage to live a life fueled by purpose and unyielding hope.

KEEP IT LONG TERM!