One of the most important things I’ve learned through my working experience for the Creative Fellowship is to accept the uncertainties that appeared during the process and let them guide me to tease out the “truth” of my work. Unlike working in a class with a group of people who are doing similar things, working individually in this fellowship made me doubt myself a lot during the practice. On the one hand, everyone in the group is working on different projects in different disciplines. On the other hand, since I am working on a real-time topic, there are constantly changes and new ideas that come to my way. I was frustrated by these uncertainties at the beginning as I wasn’t sure if I was making the right choice, but then I realized a lot of ideas I liked and progress I made were grown from these uncertainties. Because I felt uncomfortable in that situation, I always wanted to push myself to ask more questions and find the answers. This helps me to develop my work and I think it is a great skill to be applied to other work as well – to put myself in an uncomfortable situation and find ways to go through it to find a comfortable place.

As an undergraduate student who studies art and art history, I wanted to apply for the MFA program to continue making art after I graduate from Pitt. The project that I am working now on for this fellowship will be in my portfolio. It not only adds variety to my works as I am adopting a new technique that I never worked with before, but also shows that I’ve been concentrating on specific topics that related to my own experiences and our surroundings through all my practices and works. During the process, I also discovered some potential ideas that I could develop into projects in the future.

As I mentioned, most of my works are focusing on specific topics such as cultural differences, self-identity, racial issues, to name but a few. If I had the chance to share my work with a particular community, I would like to share them with people of color and people from different cultures. I always think that people who have a similar experience would understand each other better and should support and help each other when needed. Therefore, I think if I could share my works with people who have similar experiences than me, we could find more common values through the works and that will help to develop the community even stronger.