duk pond.

illustration series

This was personal and non-commercial project dedicated to capture the concept of Yugen.

Yungen is a Japanese word pertaining to a profound awareness of the universe. It described as a inability to gasp on how big the world is.


Inspirations for this sequence of posters came from a childhood memory of a duck pond near my house. During the springtime, I would watch lifeless body of water slowly nursing itself to becoming a buoyant habitat. I used to imagine that there is an inexplicably big and mysterious world for words to describe beyond the dark waters of the pond lake.

During the pandemic, I graduated from SCAD as a Motion Design Major, and moved to California to pursue my career as a design freelancer. I experienced familiar vastness of the deep unknown that awaits for me in a new place. Anxiety from moving brought me back to thinking about life in those deep waters of pond lake. I instantly had an idea to recreate the vastness of this feeling in my art.

In this series, I play with scale of characters to carry the viewer beyond the everyday world into an inconceivably mysterious realm.

  process