scrapbook: autobiography

The Autobiographical Pact and other works we have studied this year are attempts to define what an autobiography really is, and how text and visual works fit into this definition of autobiography.

Well, my definition of an autobiography isn't as standard, scientific, or provable. It is something within my head which will recognize pieces of text and art it encounters as autobiographical or not automatically without neccessarily having a set of standards or rules to check it by.

Basically I believe an autobiography is a piece created by an individual which expresses that individual's essence.

As far as I'm concerned the details of the history in one's life, or what actually happened in the past is irrelevant. What truly matters is the person perceived it as such or decided for some conscious reason that the change in details to represent some aspect of themselves. Whether it was a madeline or a piece of toast is irrelevant. What truly matters is that the author felt the madeline captured the essence of what had occurred more accurately than a piece of toast would have, and decided to represent the birth of his recollection with madeline rather than toast.

Is it really important as to what truly happened in someone's life? Autobiography isn't an historical document. It is an art form for self expression. As Chad expressed during class, what he disliked about autobiography was the Armstrong form of autobiography-- the telling of what happened in one's life like a nonfiction piece, with a few inner reflections revealed. It was Nothomb's creative piece which made autobiography a form of art rather than an document recording events in one's life which interested him.

There is more to literature than a record of accurate events. Therefore, there is a difference between literature and less creative forms like journalism. I took a class in the later, and I admit, I have developed a strong distaste for it.

The self we consciously decide to show others may seem like a construction, but that to reveals the character of the person writing about themselves. They are a person who feels they must construct themselves for some reason. After all, writers tend to be creative people. If they are less creative than naturally inclined, does that show who they are? As far as I'm concerned, non-writers should not be writing, period. They can have biographies and journalistic articles written about them, but I don't want to see a tainting and degrading of the quality of an artistic genre.

Michelle Stover and Karen Kim
The physical difference between me and Michi extends far beyond the color of our hair. While we share the same height (in between 5'6" and 5'7"), the same shoe size, bra size, clothing size, and eye glass perscription, she is obviously caucasian while I am just asian without the "cauc" before it.

She has sparkling bright blue eyes which change with her mood, the weather, and her outfit, a prominent nose and chin showing dignity and perhaps some aristocracy in her family's past. Her facial structure and body structure differs from mine. Her skin is an anemic white without the trace of golden undertone I have. Even the hairs lining her skin seem bleached lighter in comparison to the dark brown and black treads growing from mine.

We obviously do not share parents, a heritage, a past, or genes. And yet, somehow I have come to know her as my "blonde twin."

I think a great deal of the matter has to do with what factors of self you consider significant in identifying yourself.

These are the factors one considers important when depicting one's self in an autobiography. For each individual there are some characteristics which each individual will find more defining of self than others.

Our appearances change with age. We can get surgery, dye our hair, get contact lenses, get into a horrible accident which disfigures us. Our personality traits develop with time. But there are certain innate aspects which are undeniable.

These uncanny similarities between Michi and I are ther reasons why I consider her my twin. I may have other friends with more similar interests, or looks or heritage, but Michi is the one who shares my lack of sense of direction, my horrible driving skills (though we both passed with 3 errors on our driving test), our tendency to be ambitious, passionate, obsessive compulsive, involved in passionate relationships, be a bit dark, be nerdy and not afraid to show it, stand up for equal rights, and have our core beliefs no one can shatter.

Physically we are not similar. Perhaps we are also not similar in actions. But my Godbrother Drew, who is dating Michi, found our resemblance to be similar enough to accidentlly interchange our names. There is something about an aura about a person which extends beyond the physical aspects like appearance, or even personality traits.

We also both have the tendency to meow, periodically.

image copyright Mao Zhi
In Truth and Beauty, Pachett attempted an autobiography of a relationship, but in her piece, the autobiography was of her relationship with Grealy, and not of Grealy’s relationship with her. Grealy was deceased, and unable to contribute her interpretation of her half of the relationship.

I am doing a collaborative piece with my boyfriend in drawing a visual representation of our relationship. In some ways, because these piece requires the input from both members involved in the relationship, and our mutual view of the relationship, would this be a truer portraiture of our relationship?



image copyright Karen Kim and Darren Chow
As with most of my collaborations, the conceptual and compositional stages are done together. The technical parts are divided by specialty. I have always loved my boyfriend’s style in shading, and drawing poses, so he did the drawing part of the piece. I was always critical, and while my boyfriend never works with color, I tend to use Adobe Photoshop 7 to color, so I tweaked the details, and finished up the piece in color via Photoshop.

I have always felt that the less one individual does on a project, the less it becomes their own, and the less artistic it becomes. I am a bit of a control freak, and I like for a piece, even if it is not as good in quality to be completely my own. However, in the case when you are revealing something about a relationship between two people, isn’t it truer if both people contribute their views? Or in fear of what the other will think, do both parties refrain from expressing themselves truly?

Then again, in every relationship, there is an amount of compromise, division of labor, collaboration, and in a good relationship, the proper chemistry to create something beautiful. The parts play yin and yang, and while they remain separated to a degree, they touch, and comprise a more beautiful and complete whole.

In theory, collaborations would be the ideal way to show a relationship. But some theories like Communism just don’t seem to pan out in real world situations.

I cannot help but to feel there is a slight lack of depth in a collaborative piece. This depth can only be found in a rare number of non-collaborative pieces created from a true artist in an inspired state of mind. To have two individuals both be at the state of mind during the proper time periods to create a beautiful collaboration is difficult to impossible.

I feel a truly successful collaborative piece would be if both sides were to show their interpretation of the relationship without showing the other. Then at the same moment, reveal to the other what they have created.

Unfortunately, in Grealy and Pachett’s case, Grealy is no longer alive to give her rendition of their relationship. We are left with a one sided view on the relationship.

For my Seminar Creative Writing: Visiting Writers class, we had to a project following the Pekar reading. I chose to do the autobiographical comic option.


image copyright Karen Kim
However, rather than drawing me as I would normally interpret myself, I drew myself with simple round features, and cat ears. This was mainly because the piece was a happy piece, and I needed my look to match the mood. The mood of the piece was due to the subject matter-- a taste of what it is like for me undergoing my everyday interactions with my roommates.

My roommates were happy, fun-loving people. My experiences with them was so, as well. How could I interpret myself as being any different?

I suppose part of it is we alter ourselves depending on company, and circumstance. In a big group of friends, I am more likely to be fun-loving, loud, and off the wall. Then when I am with the same person on a one on one basis I might be more quiet, supporting, conservative. When I am completely alone, I tend to wallow around in the more depressing of my emotions, listening to depressing music, and create my art and writing.

The taste of my life I exhibit in this comic is the light side of me. Thus I interpreted myself as how I saw myself when surrounded by these people, and when I was in these situations. I tended to act more immature, claiming the maturity level of a 7 year old (holding up 4 fingers) or parading around the house with the cat ears I got from Michael’s. (I have this odd tendency to meow in my sleep, so I matched it up with other catty behavior. I like how addictive catty behavior is to even those who claim to be most disgusted or annoyed by my actions.)

Yes, this me looks nothing like the me I would have drawn had it been a more depressing piece. But can anyone say it is not me? Are we not all a little different depending on our company?

I remember in high school, the honors classes tended to be filled with the same people, so there was an extreme segregation between honors and non-honors. There were exceptions, such as Aja King. When she hung around her honors friends, she would act more intelligent, with a preacher-like tone in her voice. Then, when she hung around her non-honors friends, her mannerisms would become more “ghetto.” This separation in mannerism is what she felt allowed her to be successful in her interactions with both groups. Had she acted “ghetto” during a school presentation, she wouldn’t have seemed nearly as sophisticated and qualified to be a lawyer during mock trials, or a speaker during certain presentations. Had she used her intellectual voice with her non-honors friends, wouldn’t they have seen her as talking down to them, and refused her company? Also, if she used her “ghetto” talk with her honors friends, wouldn’t they find the shift in her tone to be odd, and hard to get used to, compared to the Aja they saw everyday in 4 of their 6 classes?

When people say you can tell a lot about a person based on their company, it is more than just who they associate themselves with-- it is also what they reveal to each group or individual. As my God-brother, Drew told me, if anyone wanted to see the full picture of who he was, they would have to talk to a lot of people, because no two people know him in exactly the same way.

Now in the case of autobiography, in Grealy and Pachett’s text, yes, the interpretation of Grealy was different. But was this due to one being less accurate than another, or merely because they were revealing different sides of Grealy? Grealy revealed her self-pitying, meditative side. Pachett revealed her fun-loving irresistible, self-centered side. But can’t they both be accurate accounts of the same person?

stock image provided by Gettyimages.com
I am an administrator of a fairly large art community by the name of Shadowness. http://shadowness.com

During my time there, I have met a series of interesting individuals from all over the world.

One of these individuals is a girl from Thailand by the name of Ying. She specializes in self-portraits of herself. Being especially cute, and extremely active (she must post more pieces at a much more frequent rate than any other member of the community), there isn’t a person on the community who doesn’t know what she looks like.

Yet, for a time, she insisted on trading pictures with her at the time boyfriend Jan, and having her member’s picture be that of a Caucasian male, rather than the Asian female everyone knew her to be.

Most people passed it off as a cute joke she and Jan were playing on the community, but I wondered sometimes.

I knew that Ying was bisexual, and often felt a deep resentment towards males. She hated being treated differently for her gender, and had characteristics I identified as being on the verge of lesbian seperatist.

Unfortunately, on online communities, it is often the case that the number of needy desperate guys will far outnumber the number of girls, and girls will receive unwanted, flirtatious behavior from the males. This is mainly caused by the pure outnubering of males to females on online communities (since males tend to be more computer orriented) and, while I hate to stereotype, just the nature of the males who spend time on online communities. (Generally, they don't have a very active social life outside the virtual world.)

Sometimes, I thought she really did want to be a male, and if certain actions like being with a girl were allowed by society, she would do so willingly.

She has told girls before that “if you were a boy, I would want to be with you.”

Instead, because it wasn’t acceptable, she would joke she was gay on April Fool’s Day, and be heart broken when a girl told her that she didn’t like her but liked a boy instead. One girl’s boyfriend even told me that his girlfriend was with Ying during the same time she was with him, for a period of time.



image copyright Ying
Ying would post art of her kissing a girl and pass it off as symbolic, while telling me she has feelings for the girl in the picture. Art was an excuse to get her to pose for Ying-- with Ying-- an excuse to get her to kiss Ying.

To everyone else, her self-representation was a joke. I wondered if to her, that representation of herself was an undeniable desire she wanted to express, but express without feeling consequences of how society would treat her afterwards. I wondered if they were cries from a part within her which wanted attention and recognition.

It reminded me a bit of Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask. Because of society, Ying was denying something inside herself. Her mask was her jokes. She would be confessing a part of her self, and during that whole time, the audience was left wondering “is she being serious, or is this a joke?” as the readers wonder “is Mishima being honest, or is this also a lie?” while reading Mishima’s text.

When I was in IB studio art back in junior year of high school my teacher asked the first page of our art journals to be a self-portrait. I proceeded to draw a giant eye, with a blurry, distorted silhouette of myself as my self-portrait.

I later discovered it wasn’t an original idea, for M.C Escher also decided to draw himself as a reflection, in one of his pieces (in his case, him holding a reflective sphere reflecting a distorted image of himself back to himself).

image copyright M.C. Escher
This led me to believe I wasn’t alone in thinking that when we draw portraits, self-portraits, or write biographies, or auto-biographies, we are merely drawing or writing our distorted perception of ourselves or others. Our perception won’t match up to the perception of others. Our perceptions during a time won’t match up to the perceptions of ourselves during another time. Also, we ourselves change with time.

It is perhaps the reason why the Lucy Grealy of Grealy’s text and the Lucy Grealy of Pachett’s text seems so different. The Grealy Grealy saw in herself wasn’t the Grealy Pachett saw.

In addition to this, the Grealy of Grealy’s text existed during a time before Pachett even knew her. Perhaps she really was a different Grealy. This was also the fear Pachett had which incited her to hurry in the writing of her tribute. She said she feared that as time went by, she would no longer be able to show Grealy as she really seemed to Pachett-- be unable to state the bad parts of her.

It is also the reason Van Gogh appears to be a completely different person in each of his portraits, and then again, a different person in Gauguin’s rendition of him.

How could I state who I was in a single image?-- I thought as I was asked to draw my self-portrait.

I decided I couldn’t.

If my teacher wanted to know who I was, she would have to base it on all of my eventual three volumes of 200 page art journals, and her interactions with me in class. All I was willing to give her on that front page was a large eye (which I happen to be proud of because everyone says my eyes have a unique shape) in which there was a distorted image of a silhouette of myself.

The themes of duality, opposition, and perception ended up being the major themes of my art journals and my art work during those years.

How much of ourselves is needed in a piece for it to be considered autobiographical?

When looking at Nothomb’s The Character of Rain, only a small three year fragment, only one of which she is conscious during comprises this autobiographical account. It must be only a sliver of the life of the individual.

When thinking about self-portraitures, they encompass an even smaller period of time. For example, Van Gogh and the work of other impressionists only encompassed the period of a moment. Likewise, his self-portraits were likely to have only captured one moment in his life.

Now think about the field of view of either an autobiography or a self-portrait. They cannot possibly cover every element, even, and thought in even that miniscule segment of their life-- nor would they want to.

I have actually done my own self-portrait in photography form, back in August when I first received my digital camera as a present from my grandpa.

It is one of those photos where I am holding the camera with one hand, and positioning it to take a picture of my body. It cuts off my face all of my face above my lower lip, most of my arms, and my legs. My body is in the center, wrapped in the contours of a corset. My description of the piece is as follows:


image copyright Karen Kim

Society's expectations is like a corset-- something about it attracts us, we give in to it and try it for ourselves, and eventually it shapes the very structure of our physical form into something more accepted and considered beautiful by the masses. We sacrifice comfort, individuality, full freedom and movement to be more accepted. Sometimes, I find myself giving in to it all as well...

The only part of myself I wished to reveal in this self-portrait was my susceptibility to the contouring of others. While it is a part of myself I was revealing, it was a self that was blending into others. I found it more appropriate to chop off my face than to leave it on.

But does leaving the portrait to be about such a narrow fragment of my life which could easily be the life of any other make this not a self-portrait at all? Don’t I generalize my view of self by specifically honing in on such a universal message? How much of ourselves is necessary to distinguish a piece as a self-portrait, or autobiographical, rather than a universal piece using myself as one of the many models?

Are themes such as conforming not a possible theme for a self-portrait?

The fact of the matter is mot people conform, to some degree. It is part of what allows society to function in an organized matter. So should an autobiography be focused in the aspects of self which are not conformed, and retain distinctive qualities? If these are the aspects outlined in an autobiographical piece, will the viewer be able to relate to it, and thus get something out of it?

Maybe it is like Patchett's work, Truth & Beauty where it shows who she is by hiding behind another. Patchett is a behind the scenes, don't focus on me but focus on who I am in connection to others type of person. Maybe in this piece I am a don't focus on me, but on how I connect to everyone else as a symbol. Don't see this as my picture, but a picture which tells something about human inclinations which I can relate to.

Sometimes what we don't see tells us more about a person than what we see. It shows the reservations a person has about themselves, their culture, and their values. For example, I would not likely ever describe what I do in the bathroom in my autobiographical pieces. My Korean culture is extremely conservative about such things, and I just can't imagine discussing such a thing, even though the bathroom plays a part in my everyday life. However, I might discuss the different of bathrooms in Korea and America based on my trip there, because the obvious lack of modernization in some areas in Korea are most obvious from this, and it is an obvious symbol. I would just distance it, by not describing my actions in the bathroom, but rather, what the bathroom set-up was, and my impressions of it, and the cultural significance of it.

image copyright Karen Kim
Also, this tendency to cut off faces and limit the viewers view of the subject is characteristic of my photography. Even before I received my camera, I would tend to cut my photos up in most public areas where I used the photo to identify myself as a person, such as my ID on deviantart.

image copyright Karen Kim. Featuring model Sandra Liu
In fact, I cut of the faces of artistic photos of my friends as well. I love how even if you cut off the face, the stance, posture, and features still reveal who it is you are looking at. As one of the reviewers of my piece of my friend Sandra said, he liked how I chopped of the head, and he could still tell that she was attractive.

As for autobiography, how accurate does it have to be to what happened in our lives in actuality for it to be considered autobiographical?

I have a tendency to be indirect. Maybe it has to do with my heritage-- the Koreans are known to be very round-a-bout in their thinking, as exhibited in the indirectness of their language. Maybe it is easier to dive deep into my true feelings if I am hiding behind a mask of metaphors, and no one can be exactly sure of what I mean about something.

Thus, when I write autobiographical or reflective pieces, I am either extremely vague (never addressing anyone by their names for example), or I put in so many metaphors and symbolism that no one is quite sure which parts actually happened.

Although these pieces don’t follow each event in my life precisely as recallable by other witnesses, I do consider them to serve an autobiographical purpose in my writing them. I am telling something about myself and my life. I am recording what has happened to me.

One such piece is my prose, “Marionette.”

image copyright Karen Kim

Evaluation based on The Autobiographical Pact:
1. A. narrative yes
B. prose yes
2. Individual life, story of a personality yes
3. Author= narrator yes but narrator is weird, and refers to herself in 3rd person (then again, so do other Koreans, often)
4. A. narrator= main character yes but “ “
B. retrospective point of view yes

In the autobiographical pact, accuracy is not one of the requirements. The main issue my piece has against this standard is that I refer to myself in 3rd person, but I assure you, I find myself doing that in real life as well, especially when I am trying to seem intelligent (though I am unsure of how not being able to refer to yourself directly makes you seem at all intelligent) or when I am trying to distance myself from myself. Then again, I think it would be extremely difficult for anyone other than myself to determine that the main character is me, with exception people who know me extremely well. I made it vague in case the main character was associated with me, it would be a bit up in the air-- perhaps as Marcel and Proust or Mishima and the main character may not be the same person.

Then again, who is the same in retrospect as they are in the present? Do we not change and become different people with time? Then again, according to the 4th dimension theory, we are the same, even if we are not to occupy a certain space until a later time.

To read my piece "Marionette" go here: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation.6167369/"

Assuming that self-portraiture is a form of autobiography, if the portrait looks nothing like your physical self, is that still considered autobiography?

Van Gogh said that he preferred painting to photographs, not only due to color (because at the time photography was black and white) but also because in his painting he was drawing something deeper than what you see on the outside, as if you were drawing the soul. If so, isn’t it possible to draw something which represents you completely, but looks nothing like you?

When I see myself in my head, the self I see isn’t the me I see in the mirror. First of all, I never see myself in entirety, or even my entire face at once. I am extremely detail oriented, and likewise, my view of myself is detal oriented. I see only my eyes, or only my mouth. I see my hair covering my face. And these flashes look nothing like me at all. Sometimes I have blue hair, or doll-life fragile facial features, or exaggerated shadows. I see myself with glossed over tinted black eyes without any white, or sometimes completely eyeless. Does that mean that is not me?

I’ve often had dreams where I would know that someone is someone in my dream, even though he looks nothing like as he does in real life. I know I am not alone in this practice, for my roommate and best friends have also admitted to substituting bodies for characters in their dreams. Their forms even change mid-dream, at times.

For example, my best friend Michi was with my brother once, but is currently with my god-brother Drew. She admitted to having a dream where Drew looked like my brother, but somehow she knew he was Drew. She didn’t even think of the possibility it was anyone other than Drew until she had woken up and thought back on the dream.

So if I was to draw myself as a doll with only one eye, and long, straight, dark blue hair, and gray-white skin, who is to say that is not me? In fact, I have drawn myself to look exactly like that, and wrote a autobiographical but highly symbolic story to match (though that is for another entry).

stock image provided by http://Gettyimages.com
Our body is just a shell. Just because two people look the same, such as identical twins, doesn’t make them the same person. They are just physically alike. And just because e become disfigured in an accident doesn’t mean we are not still recognizable. Or just because we lose the ability to hear or see doesn’t me we lose the ability to recognize when someone we love is near us.

In that sense, couldn’t we splatter our emotions onto the canvas, and say that that was our soul, or a part of it. Couldn’t a large majority of the existing art already be classified as a portraiture? What different rules go to classifying portraiture than biographies?

In my Seminar Creative Writing: Visiting Writers class (CRWT 191), we read Harvey Pekar’s graphic narrative, American Splendor.

image created by Derek Walls

In the graphic narrative genre, the art is a combination of how the images and text work together.

However, in Pekar’s case, while all the text is written by him, all the images are drawn by artists other than himself. In fact, each strip is drawn by a different artist.

My question is, is this piece then to be considered autobiographical? Biographical? Somewhere in between?

Evaluation based on The Autobiographical Pact:
1. A. narrative yes
B. prose no
2. Individual life, story of a personality yes
3. Author= narrator yes for the text
No for the images
4. A. narrator= main character yes
B. retrospective point of view yes

Other than it not being a prose piece, the main discrepancy is in the conflict of half of the piece, the art half, being done by a separate person.

Graphic narratives are usually non-autobiographical and written and drawn by the same person (at least in the case of artistic graphic narratives and Asian graphic novels, as opposed to industry produced comics where different people do line, color, etc… like an assembly line), but in Pekar’s case, the story and text is autobiographical, but the drawings are portraitures or caricatures done by professional comic artists. As far as the audience knows, though the comic artists seem to observe Pekar before going about their rendition of him, Crumb seems to be the only one of these artists who truly knows Pekar, and is close enough to be considered a friend. Crumb even finds himself in a strip or two.

However, upon reading American Splendor, although I am extremely interested in visuals and art, I can say that the texts were, for me, far more intriguing than the images, and that the text could stand alone as a narrative without any images at all. In fact, I often find myself ignoring the images, and just reading the text. I could see the text being typed out separated from the images, and made into a narrative in that way. If that was to happen, that body of text would fully constitute as being autobiographical-- and with a few additions, an autobiography.

Thus, due to the distance between the text and images formed from not being created by the same author or having a single director oversee the piece, it is possible to completely separate the text and images as being two entirely separate works-- one of which is autobiographical, and the other biographical.