Artist Kyung-Me’s The Labyrinth is a scrollable digital narrative, where audiences can navigate through the artist’s story told through hand-drawn watercolor and ink scenes. Reflecting the palpable sense of possibility a new year brings, Kyung-Me’s immersive project unfolds like a cyclical dream, tracing a journey of self-discovery that mirrors her own artistic evolution while resonating with the shared human experience of transformation. With a computer mouse or touchpad as a guide, each scene progresses through dynamic scrolling, where a user’s manual computer interactions cause elements on the webpage to appear, move, and disappear as each frame leads to another. Within each segment, universally understood dream symbols from Kyung-Me’s subconscious (mirrors, eyes, windows, and cocoons) ebb in and out of view as the never-ending narrative develops and dissolves, evoking a feeling of discovering something anew. 

The digital-first format and scrolling physicality of the narrative mimic Kyung-Me’s own inward sojourn, presenting an evocative meditation on the artistic process and the non-linear nature of self-reinvention. By scrolling through Kyung-Me’s infinite ouroboros of images, viewers control the rate at which transformations occur, allowing us to pause at certain frames to reflect on their transitory meaning. These moments of “stuckness” are integral to change, highlighting transformation as both struggle and renewal. In the artist’s words, “Everyone has this fantasy of wanting to change, but it doesn’t just happen. You have to do things in order to change. It requires action and struggle, sometimes failing.” With this idea in mind, Kyung-Me’s Artlab Digital Commission is both a daring departure and intentional continuation of her practice. Building on themes touched upon in her earlier works, The Labyrinth’s introductory “ink blot” images and 71 narrative drawings explore the unconscious and the invisible architecture of entrapment—societal, spiritual, and psychological—through recurring symbols like labyrinths, mirrors, solitary women, and ornate rooms.

The Labyrinth also signals a “new discovery” within Kyung-Me’s creative approach, presented as her inaugural digital-first piece with a sense of scrollable physicality. Unlike the meticulous, painstakingly rendered scenes she has devoted a decade of her practice to, the drawings within the artist’s ink blot explorations that appear in The Labyrinth’s opening sequence and subsequent narrative illustrations convey Kyung-Me’s move toward spontaneity and freedom from her old methods of creating. Drawn in the early morning hours, when the artist first wakes, the labyrinth journey, in her words, started “with a single mark…following it without knowing where it would lead.” Presented as loosely structured chapters chronicling the self-transformation process, ethereal ink blots lead to and frame a story where girls become caterpillars, then butterflies; rooms collapse into vortexes; mirrors blink into eyes. Throughout these drawings, their gestural quality prompts us to trust our intuition, leading us to discover our own labyrinths and symbols. Each illustrative gesture is a reminder that real change—personal or creative—requires experimentation, risk, and letting go of perfection.