I am honored to participate in this enamel competition. After being assigned poet Tracy K. Smith, I learned and was very impressed with the poem LIFE ON MARS and I also understand why this poem is so famous and brought her the prestigious award.

have read the analysis of this poem, about the endless space, about the universe where we are never alone, about the desire to explore the vast universe, about the mysterious planet Mars, about the issue of racial discrimination... Through that feeling, I sketched the idea with the image of a Buddhist monk wearing a robe made of scraps of fabric with 5 colors symbolizing the 5 skin colors of the peoples in the world: White, black, yellow, brown and red. All 5 colors are combined into a robe, thereby expressing national harmony, the peoples unite together to explore the distant universe. The image of the Buddhist monk is sketched on the path to find Enlightenment, through which I named this work SELFLESS.

I set the enameling challenges for my piece through the requirements: to have hand-made details as small as a human hair, to combine vitreous enamel and natural Aventurine (instead of Aventurine enamel) to create a gentle sparkling effect, and finally to have a mirror-like polished surface with no scratches or surface pores that can be examined with a magnifying glass of up to 15x magnification.