In reflecting on the issues of urban alienation and perceptual rupture, I have been deeply influenced by philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s work The Burnout Society. Han argues that contemporary society has shifted from what Michel Foucault described as a “disciplinary society” to what he terms an “achievement society.” In this context, the individual is no longer oppressed by external forces, but becomes a subject of self-exploitation, driven by internalized imperatives of productivity and performance. The phrase “I can” replaces “you must,” but beneath this illusion of freedom lies a deeper form of psychological exhaustion and perceptual collapse. Trapped in the endless pursuit of optimization and efficiency, people gradually lose their capacity to engage meaningfully with space, time, and emotion—resulting in widespread states of sensory numbness and fatigue.

 

From a social perspective, my drawing practice functions as a visual response to this condition. The fragmented compositions and blurred spatial constructions in my work are not simply formal strategies, but acts of resistance against the values of clarity, speed, and usefulness that dominate achievement-oriented logic. The act of viewing is deliberately slowed down, and the empty spaces within the images become sites of psychological pause. They invite the viewer to momentarily withdraw from the system of information overload and mental exhaustion, and to recover suppressed emotional sensitivity through ambiguity and uncertainty. In this sense, my drawings do not seek to represent specific memories or places—they attempt to construct a “counter-fatigue” visual politics: a space of rest and introspection for bodies and minds made alien by the conditions of contemporary urban life.