A woman in red hanbok ascends floating stone steps toward a red moon, with a rocket and astronaut in a starry sky beyond pine mountains.

Pratt Show 2026 · Undergraduate Communications Design

A Home of
One’s Choosing

Women, Thresholds, and Self-Determined Belonging

An illustration thesis by Ashlee Oh (Che Young Oh)

Six paintings, read as a contemporary byeongpung — a Korean folding screen of women crossing thresholds, moving from private rest toward chosen arrival.

Enter the screen Read the statement

Six plates · one sentence

A woman, leaving the room she did not choose.

A path that rises into her own sky.

A boat she shares with herself.

A city lit, briefly, from within.

A landscape wide enough to keep her quiet.

A return that is not the same as a beginning.

Artist Statement

A quiet language for chosen belonging.

A Home of One’s Choosing reinterprets the visual language of traditional East Asian painting — Korean minhwa and ink-wash color painting — to explore women’s dreams, freedom, movement, and self-determination. The project began with private questions: the wish to leave, to rest, to move, and to live in a direction shaped by the self.

As the work developed, those personal feelings widened into a reflection on the quiet aspirations carried by women across generations. The six paintings are conceived as a contemporary byeongpung (병풍, the Korean folding screen) — a continuous landscape where doors, paths, mountains, water, and celestial imagery become symbols of transition and choice.

Home, in this project, is not a fixed location. It is an emotional and psychological condition — a space made through self-knowledge, self-permission, and chosen direction. The figure is small within the landscape: not in weakness, but in standing before a larger world of possibility.

The Quiet Journey

From private rest to chosen arrival.

Read left to right, the six panels move from rest to ascent, crossing, celebration, reflection, and return. Together they form a folding-screen journey in which home is not a fixed place, but a self-chosen state of belonging.

  1. Rest by Water — a woman reading in a hammock by the sea.
    01Rest by Waterintimacy
  2. Ascending — a woman climbing floating steps toward a red moon.
    02Ascendingaspiration
  3. Crossing — two women on a boat under a red sun.
    03Crossingtransit
  4. Moonlit City — two women dancing on a rooftop under a yellow moon.
    04Moonlit Cityjoy in the social
  5. Open Landscape — a woman picnicking before green mountains and a red sun.
    05Open Landscapesolitary expansion
  6. Sky Crossing — a woman in a hot-air balloon with a crane, a deer, and a turtle in clouds.
    06Sky Crossingarrival

Read together, the six panels form the body of a single, patient sentence — a journey one walks rather than reads.

The Six Plates

Six paintings, one continuous landscape.

Each plate carries a station of the journey. The figure does not arrive at home; she gradually becomes the one who chooses where home is.

  1. Plate I · No. 01

    Rest by Water

    Home as Posture

    The beginning of self-permission. Stillness before departure — a body learning to stay.

    Concept
    A body learning stillness.
    Medium
    Ink, color, and hanji on panel
    Year
    2025–2026

  2. Plate II · No. 02

    Ascending

    A Path That Rises

    Movement toward dream and possibility; the figure pulled upward by her own light.

    Concept
    Movement toward dream and possibility.
    Medium
    Ink, color, and hanji on panel
    Year
    2025–2026

  3. Plate III · No. 03

    Crossing

    Rest as Movement

    Rest as movement. The body unhurried even in transit — two figures sharing a boat at the seam between skies.

    Concept
    Movement and rest existing together.
    Medium
    Ink, color, and hanji on panel
    Year
    2025–2026

  4. Plate IV · No. 04

    Moonlit City

    Lit From Within

    Joy and embodied freedom in social space; the city becoming a room large enough to dance in.

    Concept
    Joy and embodied freedom within social space.
    Medium
    Ink, color, and hanji on panel
    Year
    2025–2026

  5. Plate V · No. 05

    Open Landscape

    Permission of the Horizon

    Chosen solitude. The inner landscape made visible at last.

    Concept
    Expanded inner landscape and chosen solitude.
    Medium
    Ink, color, and hanji on panel
    Year
    2025–2026

  6. Plate VI · No. 06

    Sky Crossing

    Threshold in Air

    Final arrival and return. Home becomes a self-chosen state of belonging.

    Concept
    Final arrival and return.
    Medium
    Ink, color, and hanji on panel
    Year
    2025–2026

Cultural Context

Minhwa, hanji, and the byeongpung.

Three Korean traditions sit at the conceptual ground of this project. Each is not borrowed but re-asked — a living language the work uses to speak about the present.

  1. 민화

    Minhwa

    Korean folk painting

    Popular painting produced largely by anonymous artisans, minhwa carried symbolic imagery into ordinary life. Its visual logic favors decoration as meaning. The project reads its borders, saekdong palettes, and pictorial symmetry as a vocabulary of belonging.

    Decorative minhwa border with landscape detail.

  2. 한지

    Hanji

    Korean mulberry paper

    Hand-made from the inner bark of mulberry, hanji is fibrous, translucent, and long-lived. Its uneven absorbency makes ink-wash unpredictable; the surface itself becomes a co-author of the painting.

    A sheet of hanji paper laid on a wooden surface.

  3. 병풍

    Byeongpung

    The folding screen

    An architectural painting. The byeongpung is read left to right as a continuous landscape, with the negative space between panels carrying as much weight as the painting itself. The project is conceived as a contemporary byeongpung — six panels offered as one continuous walk.

    Traditional ink-wash landscape painting, used as compositional reference.

A Reader’s Guide

A short vocabulary for the work.

Recurring symbols carry the emotional weight of the project. These are the shapes the paintings keep returning to.

Door · Threshold
Moments of decision; the membrane between worlds, the instant a life turns.
Path · Road
Possibility and departure. The slow unfolding of a chosen direction.
Water
Emotional movement and transformation. What carries the self forward.
Mountain
Distance and longing. The inner expansion that travel makes visible.
Tree · Nature
Shelter and growth. The quiet ground of the self.
Sun · Moon
Time, guidance, and imagination. Two faces of the same long wish.
Home
Not a fixed place, but a state of self-directed belonging.

Process & Progress

From first ink to finished panel.

Research, sketches, color, and material — a quiet record of how the work clarified itself, slowly, through revision.

01 / 06

Drawing toward a tradition

The project began in the company of old paintings. Korean minhwa, East Asian ink-wash, and the structural logic of the byeongpung offered a way of seeing the world as both observable and symbolic.

Traditional ink-wash landscape painting reference.
Ink-wash painting — atmosphere through restraint.
Minhwa decorative border reference.
Minhwa borders — symmetry that organizes feeling.
Saekdong striped palette reference.
Saekdong palette — stripes as a tonal scale.

02 / 06

Hanji, brush, and panel

The work is made of specific materials, and the materials are part of the meaning. Hanji holds the wash; nikawa binds the pigment; the panel makes the painting a body in a room.

A wooden panel prepared for painting.
Wooden panel — the substrate beneath the paper.
A sheet of hanji laid out.
Hanji surface — mulberry paper sized on panel.
Bottle of nikawa animal-skin glue.
Nikawa glue — animal-skin binder for mineral pigment.
A wide hake brush sizing a panel with water.
Brush and ink — one breath of pigment at a time.

03 / 06

Pigment as vocabulary

Color in this project is not decoration; it is a way to speak. These studies test small palettes against figure and landscape. A short glossary sits beside the studies.

Color study of mountains in jade and indigo.
Jade & indigo — mountains against ink blues.
Color study in ochre and gold.
Warm field — ochre and gold; paper lit.

A short glossary

Minhwa red
Sun and moon; longing.
Ochre
Memory; paper-light.
Jade
Mountains; shelter.
Indigo
Night air; water.
Earth
The ground beneath the foot.
Skin warmth
The body, kept soft.

04 / 06

Figure, scale, landscape

The figure is intentionally small — not minimized, but scaled to the world. These sketches test where the body should stand within the landscape and how much room the air around her should carry.

Sketch of a hammock composition.
Hammock 01 — rest as posture.
Sketch of a hammock composition with trees framing the figure.
Hammock 02 — trees lean inward to make a room.
Sketch of a boat composition.
Boat 01 — two figures, the horizon does the work.
Refined boat sketch with shifted sun.
Boat 02 — same scene; the sun shifts position.

05 / 06

Lines — the closest thing to ink

Once a composition is settled, every painting passes through a clean linework stage. The line drawing carries the whole image’s rhythm before any color arrives — a moment when the work is closest to a folding-screen ink painting.

Line stage of Rest by Water.
Rest by Water — resting body.
Line stage of Open Landscape.
Open Landscape — the figure inside permission.
Line stage of Crossing.
Crossing — two banks of one river.
Line stage of Moonlit City.
Moonlit City — where movement and joy meet.

06 / 06

From sketch to final, side by side

Each finished image is the surface of many decisions. These pairings hold an early version beside a later one — a record of how the work clarified itself through revision.

Earlier version of Ascending.
Ascending — early. Composition without final color.
Ascending — hanji texture study.
Ascending — hanji. Surface brought forward.
Earlier version of Crossing.
Crossing — early. Open water.
Earlier cool-palette version of Moonlit City.
Moonlit City — second palette study.
  1. What kind of world have I inherited?
  2. How far am I allowed to go?
  3. What does home mean to me?

Home is the state she gradually learns to choose for herself.

Companion Booklet

The exhibition companion.

A printed booklet accompanies the work at Pratt Show 2026, gathering the concept, materials, symbols, and finished paintings into a quiet, hand-held form — a reading companion to the screen.

View booklet Download PDF

Thesis materials

About & Contact

Ashlee Oh

Ashlee Oh is an illustrator whose thesis work reimagines traditional Korean visual language — minhwa, ink-wash, and the byeongpung — through contemporary questions of freedom, movement, and belonging.

Project
A Home of One’s Choosing — Women, Thresholds, and Self-Determined Belonging
Exhibition
Pratt Show 2026 · Undergraduate Communications Design
Email
Ashleeoh1005@gmail.com
Website
ashleeoh.art