mirrors
I've been creatively stuck for so long..... Building on old work has been inadvertently restricting. I was circling the same themes and subject matter. I'm not the person I was. I need to write from 2026. Revising an old essay is not the same as remembering.
I'll pretend (for now) that my draft manuscript doesn't exist and trust that readers will make connections between old and new. Pretending to write from a blank slate has been freeing.
Beneath each essay lies a body of work and thinking. Even if I don't make the link explicit, I'm a connecting thread. My viewpoint. My aesthetics. My writing sensibility.
I've struggled to find the theme that ties everything together. A writing teacher once suggested mirrors as they appeared in 'Through the Looking Glass' (2018), 'From the Other Side' (2019), and '(Im)material Inheritances' (2020). I shifted to windows, then longing.
Perhaps it's time to return to mirrors.
still from 선미 (SUNMI) 'STRANGER' MV (2023)
Last night, I revisited 선미 SUNMI's music. My friend Z introduced me to Sunmi's 'Gashina (가시나)' when I visited him for Christmas in 2021. (Her performance with Taemin is FANTASTIC.) I love 'Siren(사이렌)', '누아르(Noir)' and '보라빛 밤 (pporappippam)' but stopped following a few years ago as her then music was less to my taste.
In an interview with NME, she explains:
“All this time, I’ve been preparing and having this journey as Sunmi, and I felt like I had enough information [to move forward]. It was a time where I looked back at myself, looked back at my music and thought, ‘How can I define my journey? What is my music?’ [In the past] I made songs for myself [to express] just my personal feelings, but now I’m making music that other people can feel comforted [by].”
From an interview with Forbes:
“It’s been almost 19 years since I debuted with Wonder Girls, and around 12 years since I started my career as a solo artist. I wanted to take a moment to look back at my journey — to reflect on my music…to understand myself better as an artist, and reorganize.”
[...]
“I didn’t think I would be doing music for this long,” she admits while reflecting on the 15 years since she and her girl group Wonder Girls broke new ground when they became the first K-pop act to enter the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in late 2009. “There are moments I did well, but I must have had moments that maybe weren’t my best. But these are all the moments that came and made me. That made Sunmi.”
Yet Sunmi’s creation wasn’t a gentle molding. She speaks politely, but with an undeniable emotional and honest gravity, opening up how that debuting so young meant she “didn’t go through puberty” until her early twenties — a period she now describes as “a dark time.”
“I didn’t know what I liked,” she shares. “When people asked me, ‘Who is Sunmi as a person?,’ I couldn’t answer. In philosophy, that’s what you call the ego — and mine was in chaos. At that time, I decided I needed to dissect and understand who I really was.”
On her path of self-discovery outside of work, she ironically leaned into one of the true markers of K-pop. She followed the ways of her devoted fans — affectionately known as Miya-ne, which translates to Sunmi’s home — and Sunmi became her own biggest fan.
“In K-pop, we call it deokjil, so I started doing deokjil on myself,” referring to the word for being and engaging as a passionate fan of something, whether that’s memorizing every trivia fact about your favorite idol or cheering them on in concert or online. “When fans do deokjil, they find out things like ‘What my bias hates most,’ ‘what they love the most,’ their little habits when they’re nervous; I began uncovering those things about myself, one by one. As I went through that process, that kind of music naturally began to come out.” That introspection led to her 2021 song “Borderline,” where her personal dissection of her borderline personality disorder led to a revelation.
“I’ve always found it difficult to communicate my emotions honestly to others,” she shares. “But in ‘Borderline,’ I shared my personal story openly — raw and without restraint. And after releasing that song, I had an extraordinary experience. I didn’t write the piece to comfort anyone else; I wrote it to comfort myself. But when I sang it during my world tour, so many fans resonated with it; they ‘felt’ it and found healing and comfort through it. That amazed me; that something I made purely for myself, the emotions I once struggled to control, could become solace and comfort for others. The emotions that had once been so hard for me to control were now finally able to be controlled.”
That’s the person behind HEART MAID: An artist who had to mend herself before taking on anyone else’s hurt. “Now, I have a space in my heart that allows me to care for the emotions of others,” she says. “And that’s how I was able to create this album.”
In one of the interview’s final moments, Sunmi becomes humbly thoughtful — but never truly embarrassed or shy — about her own growth. “Being an artist who can offer empathy and comfort through music…ah, calling myself an ‘artist’ feels a bit cheesy,” she says with a laugh. “But that’s the kind of singer I was able to become.”
She then offers something quietly gut-wrenching: “These 19 years of time are Sunmi as a person because I only pursued music, and my way of expressing my emotion was always through music. I dug deep into this… All these emotions of 19 years are in my discography. So, that’s why I would like to define it as my life itself and Sunmi as a person.”
