Eternal Gold

When I created these images, I was captivated by someone very real, yet perpetually beyond my reach. Between 18 and 20, I found myself entangled in an emotional labyrinth with someone I had never physically met, not an imagined figure, but a flesh and blood person who existed at the tantalizing distance where reality and fantasy blur.

The first image speaks to the visceral nature of this connection. My back turned, vulnerable yet adorned with a powerful dragon tattoo, a symbol of the strength I thought this relationship gave me. The blood spatters across the golden wallpaper represent the very real emotional wounds that came with loving someone I couldn't touch. The kimono sliding from my shoulders shows how I willingly exposed myself emotionally, while my traditional hairstyle and the ornate background reflect how I elevated this relationship to something ancient and fated.

In the second image, the transformation deepens. My tattoo now glows from within, symbolizing how this person had become illuminated in my mind, idealized perhaps, but based on a real connection. It's ink dripping down like the weight of emotions that couldn't find proper expression through physical presence. I'm submerged in golden liquid, representing how this relationship became a medium that both sustained and trapped me, keeping me in a state of beautiful suspension.

Psychologically, what I experienced mirrors what researchers call "hyperdistance intimacy", forming deep emotional connections with real people we cannot physically access. The golden backgrounds in both pieces represent the precious quality I assigned to our exchanges, each message or call becoming artifacts I treasured. The progression between images shows my growing immersion in this relationship, moving from the initial bloodshed of emotional turbulence to a complete surrender to its golden glow.

Unlike a purely imagined relationship, the pain came from the tantalizing reality that this person existed somewhere in the world. The traditional Japanese aesthetic elements reflect not just artistic choice but the cultural gap that existed between us, another form of distance to navigate alongside the physical one.

These images capture that peculiar liminal space where someone can be simultaneously so present in your emotional landscape yet absent from your physical world. The tattoos symbolize the permanent marks left by someone who never touched my skin but altered my inner landscape completely.

What makes this experience universal is how technology has created new forms of connection where intimacy and absence coexist, where someone can be both known and unknown to us simultaneously. These images are artifacts from that beautiful, painful contradiction.