Brian Oh
Half Love
Prompt: In this project: Poetic Montage, we were asked to create a visual response to the poem of our own selection(selections). This assignment read to me as a way to convey the emotion from the poems and visualize it through the eyes of my own unique experience. The key to working on this assignment was to see me in the position of the poets and to see themselves in the situation of mine.
The title “Half Love” is a direct translation of the Korean word “짝사랑(Jjag-Salang),” which indicates the love that lost its pair, or unrequited love. I speak with confidence that almost everyone would most definitely experience this unrequited love at some point in their lifetime -and I am no exception to it. Loving someone but not being able to feel the love back is like a bowl of mixed emotions; I could feel my heart alive from loving someone but at the same time could not do anything to stop it from hurting me with the despair of being unable to receive the love back. This particular love that is full of grief and despair -yet so beautiful and lively- spoke out to me as interesting and it made me connect myself to the poems that specifically deliver these emotions because I was in a state of despair and grief of unrequited love during the process of making this project as well. There are no many different forms of love and not all of them are corresponding to the commercial portrayal of love as something full of happiness and positivity. Although unrequited love may be simply dismissed as something full of grief and loneliness, I refuse to think that it takes away from the beauty of loving someone.