A Puker
A Puker (토하는 사람)
I can only describe my facial expression nowadays as one that can only be imagined as a “puking” face.
I drew the person who is puking, and this is not the first time I’ve drawn this figure. It emerged for the first time in 2017. Back then, I was disgusted not only by the physical violence I encountered but by the silent, innate nature of violence in Korea. It was right after the Gangnam Station incident, the Me Too movement, and the continual sexual harassment and violence at academia, including cases of drug-assisted rape by Korean celebrity. I had to enclose this constant trauma within myself, forcing a detachment from it in order to make my life better and to take myself not so seriously (it was too painful to face back then, and still I am)
Now, I face this again. It is 2024 and things didn’t chance much. I think it is much horrific now. We are witnessing genocide every day. How casually we use such heavy, light words now—unreasonable death. Death that people treat as just another story yet it is reality.
I draw the person who vomits, Puker. Literally, it is the person who vomits—who spits out. It is a bodily association with particular symbols. This act of vomiting is such an expression of meaninglessness and the absurdity of life, serving as a metaphor for existential angst.
The fundamental human emotion that signals danger and the violation of bodily boundaries has been violated itself. The aversion to vomit, once a marker of disgust, now intersects with deeper psychological boundaries—the boundary between what is "inside" versus "outside" ourselves. The act of vomiting becomes not only a bodily function but an existential act: the body expelling the unbearable, the unspeakable, the uncontainable.
This is what it feels like to live in a world where violence has become so normalized that it is no longer even shocking. What is left for us, then, but to expel it? To vomit it out, to purge it, and yet, the act of purging itself feels futile. The violence is internalized, festering within us, and the boundary between inside and outside becomes ever more blurred.
In the end, this vomit is not just an expulsion of matter. It is a desperate act of self-preservation—a way to rid the body of the contamination of a world gone numb to its own suffering.
