Work Text:
The clouds cast a heavy shadow all over the studio, shrouding the atmosphere in something muted and paused. The evening seemed as if time had stopped and it was only him, his canvas, and his thoughts. Soobin was a sculpture major but for this informal exhibit he decided to tap into the basics from back when he first started to love painting in high school…when he walked past the art room and witnessed one of his seniors work on their submission piece for a competition being held by the most renowned art college in the city. He doesn’t know if he fell in love with the artist or the art, well, he doesn’t know what came first, but it’s been years and both of them, his first loves, have still stuck.
As much as his soul yearns to, he’s obviously not going to be a creep and paint a random senior again and again, even though his heart always went back to the same face, the same eyes, the same mouth, the same hands…his muse. He also knows there is a fine line before it runs into an obsession…into possession…something unhealthy and he didn’t want to detach this human from their own being by just building castles in the skies with what he perceives of them to be of, what he beheld of them to be, because he places his senior on an altar long ago when he passed the art room in school and ever since then he’s been trying to reconcile, to humanise him, because Yeonjun deserves more than that.
He deserves to be seen as an actual person and not just a product of someone’s imagination.
Soobin supposes that he loves spending time at his university, the studio was his only escape. That was his only reprise coming from a world where people just pushed children into fields that felt safer out of an anxiety that stems from a civilisation that has increasingly been led towards survival, survival, and survival by a few greedy elite who want to destroy the planet. A society, a civilisation, a community of people who saw an anxiousness of not having enough, of dwelling in their lack, of dwelling in their potential lack, that even in times where there is much more abundance than before in terms of opportunity and what can be done, the manufactured scarcity has led everyone into “practical” careers coming hoping they can keep up.
Coming in from such an atmosphere, Soobin knows that it was both stupidity and privilege that helped him pursue what he is right now. He supposes that it also stems from the fact that he doesn’t really need to do anything apart from look after himself. He has no other expectation or responsibility apart from making something out of himself…to prove himself. If he floats, he floats. If he sinks, he sinks.
His father told him that if he was going to jump into the sea of uncertainty, he better be one of the few who gets out of it soaring on the top of the waves. He told him that all he had to do was survive for himself, take after himself. That’s was the deal. That and the fact that he would never be perceived as a son of the family again…but that was a small price to pay according to Soobin, to be able to live a life such as this.
He suppose he does romanticise his art a lot, his university a lot. Four years and he will be out of this and he would dearly miss it. It is not always going to be just assignments and exhibitions and evaluations, along with personal pieces crammed in between even though he has literally no time for anything else. He knows that he’ll have to soon make a living out of it. He doesn’t know if he wants that because frankly all he wants to do is just create.
Humans were made to just create and exist and love, and just be. He supposes it’s a cruel world, but he doesn’t know if it’s the fault of humans or that even without the structure, society, and the formation of all the systems…he doesn’t know if they’d have been any better. Humans were always fighting for survival but somehow the past always seems happier.
The future seems bleak and the present unyielding. There is no escape. There is only this now, there is only this quest with no guarantee of a reward at the end of this downtrodden path.
People say how life must be lived in the now and the only way Soobin thinks he can practice a modicum of that principle is when he paints. Outside of it, it’s not even a blue period. There is no colour in his life and it isn’t some tragedy and it isn’t that he is unwell.
Soobin thinks he just, somewhere along the line, got very disappointed once the childhood technicolour-saturated-sparkles of wonder in every day life kind of collapsed. The only life he exists in, the only reality he perceives, is the one he invented…the one he envisions into existence. The potential he sees in the world is what keeps him going and therefore he creates. With his hands, which his brushes, which his tunes, with his his body. He feels that all of his work is basically the potential of what human race could be, what life could be, what existence could be. His work is merely an offering, a prayer, a plea to divine intervention for something better.
He supposes this mindset of scarcity, of lack, has probably gotten to him too and he might be deterring abundance by thinking this way, feeling this way, existing this way… the abundance being the senior who has been the love of his life since his first year of high school, who is now also his senior at university; Not that he followed him here, that would be crazy. No, this university simply was the best one could go to in the city.
Yeonjun’s journey is in a different major but he did have a minor in painting and sculpture, so their paths overlapped for an hour, two days a week, and they have been for the past year of student life. Technically it is only because Soobin is a TA and since he’s sculpture major tutoring the ones who are talking the basics courses, therefore coming across Yeonjun. But fortunately or unfortunately, Soobin thinks it’s more fortunate because he would’ve been a mess otherwise, he is not Yeonjun’s assigned tutor.
He concludes as he continues moulding the clay onto the canvas that the reason for his loneliness is the failure of mankind. If only civilisation were successful, if only civilisation was the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of hedonism for all, then he would not be so sad. He would not be so blue and therefore in doing that, and being that, he might have been the perfect hue for Yeonjun. Maybe if he wasn’t so sad, he could love Yeonjun too, maybe if he wasn’t so sad he could love himself the way Yeonjun would love him too, and maybe if he wasn’t so sad then he could paint him for the world to see as a declaration of his love and devotion. And maybe, if he wasn’t so sad, there would be a room filled with idols, even if he was committing blasphemy, even if he was doing the opposite of humanising his love, there would be a room filled with idols of him because Yeonjun deserves to be worshipped in this bleak world.
A tear escapes him, not for the first time ever since, and Soobin thinks, no, reels…
The only faith he holds is in his heart is in art in general, is in God’s ability of creation, and what better an example of it all than this boy that made him decide the trajectory of his life at 14.
Oh, how he missed him.