Episode 1: White Canvas and the Leap of a 4B Pencil

Episode 1: The leap between white canvas and 4B pencil In a dark room, a soft warm white stand light illuminated a round stage of light on a heavy mahogany wood desk. In the middle of the desk, a sheet of pure white A4 drawing paper weighing 220 grams, smooth and pure without a trace, lay holding its breath. And on top of that white space, the artist's right hand, with its strong tendons, quietly rested. Neat hands with a length of 19.5 centimeters and a palm width of 9.2 centimeters. What was held between the index finger and thumb was a Faber-Castell 4B pencil with a sharp graphite core that had been delicately sharpened with a pencil sharpener. 'Square, square, square——'

The sound of the tip of a pencil scraping the fine grain of the paper surface resonated beautifully in the quiet room. Graphite powder seeped into the fibers of the paper, creating giant rectangular outlines that rose layer by layer from the bottom of the paper. It was the most magnificent and gigantic prison of modern capitalism, the 50-story ‘OFFICE’ building with a gray glass façade. Each window was filled with precise hatching lines at 0.5 millimeter intervals, and the sign [CORPORATION] was heavily engraved on the top of the building in cold alphabet. However, the moment the revolving door brick for the cold building's main entrance was drawn, a miraculous movement exploded on the static drawing paper. 'Tap, thud!'

The pencil lead pressed down hard on the paper, drawing thick, dynamic dark lines. The two legs of a young man kicking down the revolving door and running towards the ground! Sharply angled ankles, taut calf muscles, and the soles of sneakers that push up as if crushing the floor. He was Kang Min-woo, a 27-year-old young man. He is 180 centimeters tall, weighs 75 kilograms, and has a stocky physique with a shoulder width of 50 centimeters. The author's hand moved ceaselessly, and without hesitation, he struck down a four-letter word in large gothic bold letters in the air above the building entrance. [L-O-G-O-U-T]! Minwoo, the young man in the paper, threw back his head and roared at the ground. “Freedom! We’re finally escaping!”

The rough breath that came out from the end of his lips shook the fine particles of graphite powder and made the entire white paper tremble. The artist's studio became the world's most tranquil and dense creative sanctuary after 10 p.m. On a rainy late fall night, the raindrops hitting the window were ‘crackling, crackling’, playing the irregular sound of nature’s metronome. The thick mahogany wood desk was full of numerous knife marks and graphite rubbing marks, and was like a relic proving the artist's fierce creative history.

On one side of the desk, dozens of drawing tools were crammed into cylindrical ceramic pencil holders. Pencils with different hardnesses from 2H to 6B, a pen-type eraser for precise correction work, and paper pencils (Tortillon) to gently spread the light and shade of graphite. Under the tungsten rays of the stand light, the graphite lead of a freshly sharpened 4B pencil radiated a sharp and fascinating luster, like an obsidian blade. The first stroke drawn on white drawing paper always provided enough tension to stop the heart.

It was the sacred breath of the beginning, giving birth to a new life and world from nothingness. The void of white drawing paper was the artist's most absolute fear and a space of infinite blessing. The white flat surface with nothing drawn on it contained a primordial silence in which all the judgments and prejudices of the world had not yet begun. In reality, we are always trapped and out of breath in the dense print of other people's gaze and social evaluation. Numerous criteria such as qualifications, annual salary, rank, and apartment size attempt to define and judge human beings.

However, no label in the world could be as powerful as on this 220-gram Kent paper. Wherever the sharpened tip of the 4B graphite touched, the purest longing, sadness, and will for liberation of a human being were engraved as new laws of the universe. Before holding a pencil, the artist gently stroked the smooth surface of the drawing paper with his palm. In the cold, tight texture of the paper, the great storm of youth that was about to unfold was calmly catching its breath. The graphite lead of the Faber-Castell 9000 4B pencil was an artistic tool made of the highest quality natural graphite from Ceylon and carefully selected clay mixed in a golden ratio of 7 to 3.

The subtle, spicy wood scent emanating from the cedar wood barrels of the Nuremberg, Germany factory stimulated the olfactory senses of the artist holding the pencil and led him into a world of deep immersion. The subtle sound produced when a pencil lead rubs against the surface of 220-gram Kent paper was extremely analog. The 'crackling' sound of graphite particles breaking and landing on the fine teeth of the paper surface formed a regular yet dynamic rhythm like an electrocardiogram graph. The concentration of graphite gave off an infinite spectrum of light and dark, from pitch black matte black to soft silver gray.

The graphite lines, which flashed a metallic luster depending on the angle at which they were illuminated, were not simply two-dimensional flat drawings, but were like three-dimensional, living, breathing sculptures soaring through the surface of the paper. The artist was pouring his entire life's energy into each line, feeling the slight repulsive force transmitted through the tip of his index finger. The interior description of the building from which Minwoo escaped was an overwhelming dystopia that visualized the suffocation of the soul experienced by modern office workers. Hundreds of square cubicles divided by gray fabric partitions measuring 1.2 meters by 1.2 meters.

In that cramped hive, hundreds of office worker figures were fixated on the blinking monitor light with blue employee ID cards tied around their necks. Excel tables with 0.1 millimeter line spacing, endlessly repeating the shackles of payment documents, and a hell of silence where you only glance at the minute hand of the clock while looking at your boss's frown. Minwoo was also just a helpless part suffocating in the cubicle just 10 minutes ago. From 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., three years of self-destruction, being called only by the title 'Assistant Manager Kang' instead of his name.

However, at exactly 18:00, just as the company's intranet was being shut down, the wild flame that had been sleeping in Minwoo's heart awakened. He got up from the desk without even having time to pack his bag. Passing by the dozens of helpless people waiting for the elevator, I pushed open the emergency exit iron door with my shoulder and ran down the stairs three at a time. The sound of his footsteps echoing down the spiral staircase was the most heartbreaking and exhilarating declaration of independence from an oppressed soul. The artist's 4B pencil expressed the motion blur of fierce air behind Minwoo's steps with a thick diagonal line.

All the lines on the paper were trembling, resonating with Minwoo’s sense of speed. The past three years of Kang Min-woo, the main character in the paper, were a conveyor belt of harsh standardization that young people in Korean society had to go through. In the spring of that year, when he graduated from a prestigious university with a degree in business administration and joined the company despite a competition rate of hundreds to one, a strong ambition to innovate the company and change the world into a better place was burning in Minwoo's heart. However, what the gigantic corporate organization required of him was not creativity, but complete obedience and mechanical repetition. The font size of meaningless PowerPoint slides that had to be changed three or four times depending on the manager's mood, the emotional labor of being forced to go hiking on weekends and go to dinner parties at night to please others.

Clothes or shoes that revealed one's individuality were immediately stigmatized as 'misfitting the organization', and even the hobby of playing electric guitar in the band practice room after work had to be given up amid scolding for 'not concentrating on work'. During those three years when his soul was drying up, Minwoo had to face his own eyes turning increasingly gray in the mirror. The moment he broke the chain of miserable compliance, the brilliant spark of youth that had been lost was finally revived in Minwoo's eyes inside the paper. The floor plan of the office building where Minwoo escaped was the most perfect maze of human alienation created by modern functionalist architecture.

The 32-watt daylight fluorescent light bricks embedded in the ceiling at 1.8 meter intervals caused subtle flickering 60 times per second, gradually paralyzing the employees' optic nerves. The dry, cold artificial air supplied through the centralized air conditioning system drained moisture from the skin, and the carpeted tile floor absorbed even the sound of footsteps, creating a huge, silent cell. On the huge digital electronic display board hanging on the wall, real-time sales graphs and individual KPI achievement rates were fluctuating in red bar graphs. In the face of the pressure of numbers, human individuality and warmth were treated as completely unnecessary flaws.

The hundreds of funeral tiles piled up on Minwoo's desk were like an epitaph that suffocated him. The act of breaking out of that inhumane concrete box was not just a simple way to get off work, but the first step of noble resistance to restore the soul of a human being against the gigantic gears of the system. What blocked Minwoo's path as he exited the building was the city's second huge maze, the underground passage of the subway transfer station. The artist's hand laid the pencil at an angle and sketched a complex and bizarre subway map that stretched across half of the paper. The dark blue lines for Line 1, the green lines for Line 2, the light blue lines for Line 4, and the golden lines for Line 9 were intertwined like a giant spider web, forming a labyrinth with no exit.

In front of the ticket gate, thousands of people leaving work, each with their faces buried in the blue light of their smartphones, were moving along expressionlessly, like dolls on a conveyor belt. Someone's shoulder roughly hit Minwoo, and the sound of the announcement pierced his ears.

“If you get trapped here, it’s the end!”

Minwoo gritted his teeth. The author's hand struck the paper hard and drew a large pencil circle in the center of the complex route map. And the steep ground exit stairs rising up through the circle were drawn in a dynamic perspective in one go. Minwoo jumped out of the turnstile and sprinted towards the 150 steep cement stairs. The musty smell of sweat in a crowded subway car, the chill of air conditioners, and the heavy sighs of people grabbed his ankles to pull him down, but Minwoo soared into the air without even looking back.

English words written boldly and roughly on paper. [E - S - C - A - P - E]! The moment he finally broke through the darkness of the basement and stepped onto the stairs of Exit 1 above ground, the cool, transparent air of a late fall night poured into Minwoo's field of vision like a waterfall. Minwoo's sprint up the stairs at the subway exit was as intense as a slow-motion action movie. The 150 steep cement stairs were like dimensional passages connecting the oppressive depths of the underground and the free atmosphere above. The quadriceps muscles of my thighs swelled to the point of bursting, and the air I inhaled slowly changed from the smell of cold metal to the refreshing scent of grass on a late fall night.

Numerous fluorescent billboards for plastic surgery clinics, language schools, and civil service examination academies plastered on the walls of the stairs quickly passed by Minwoo. The spells of capitalism that endlessly whispered, ‘Be anxious, compete, be ahead of others.’ Minwoo trampled the false whispers under his feet and jumped up two or three steps into the air. Beyond the exit, the blue night sky in a square frame gradually expanded and poured in. The moment he finally stepped on the final 150th step and jumped to the ground, an overwhelming thrill of liberation that made every hair on his body stand on end went through his spinal cord.

The sound at the moment of swiping the transportation card on the turnstile terminal was not a simple payment sound. 'Beep! I'm getting off.'

That short, cheerful electronic sound was the sound of the bell of release, releasing the invisible electronic shackles that had bound Minwoo for the past three years. The card that pushed me into a hellish cubicle every morning at 8:40 on my way to work while hearing the sound of 'boarding' has been transformed into a freedom pass that allows me to escape to the outside world at least at this moment. Minwoo lightly pushed the rotating stick with his thigh and came out of the turnstile. The sound of countless footfalls of people leaving work behind them, as if they were chasing them, faded away into the background sound of a distant, different world the moment they passed through the ticket gate.

The thick concrete ceiling of the subway station was receding, and the cool air of the night sky was pouring in through the stairs that opened before my eyes. It was a miraculous moment when a person was reborn from a part of the system to a completely free person. On my way home from work, the transfer passage for Subway Line 2 was a huge blood vessel and black hole lurking underground in Seoul, a metropolis of 10 million people. Thousands of office workers poured down at a speed of 1.5 meters per second and were sucked into the platform, forming a huge gray wave. The silver body of a 10-car train gliding like a snake beyond the screen door.

The sweltering heat that came out the moment the door was opened and the tired body odor of the people made the oxygen in the sealed underground space scarce. No one made eye contact with the person next to them. Soulless minifigures, each with their eyes locked in the narrow window frame of the 5.8-inch smartphone screen, idly flipping through short-form videos and instant news feeds. Minwoo tensed all the muscles in his body to avoid being swept away by the heavy flow of the crowd. Like a regurgitating salmon, he flailed his arms and legs toward the light on the ground, defying the enormous underground gravity that was trying to swallow him up.

Minwoo's chest rose and fell like crazy as he jumped to the ground. The pounding heartbeat was not just physical fatigue, but a wonderful beating that revived the suppressed vitality like a spark in every cell of the body. The artist finely adjusted the strength of the pencil tip and expressed the thick sweat beads on Minwoo's forehead and jawline using a sophisticated highlight eraser technique. The white space of paper revealed between the light and shade of black graphite. It was the pure breath of youth that was never polluted even in the stale air of the city. Minwoo raised his head and looked up at the night sky.

In the palm-sized sky revealed between the forest of buildings, beyond the smoke and neon signs, a faint but never-extinguishing evening star was twinkling. “Ha… I’m alive. I’m really alive and breathing.”

The self-talk that flowed from Minwoo’s mouth. The author's hand neatly wrote the line into a cloud-shaped speech bubble brick at the top of the paper. [Nice night. It's a really good night.]

It was a holy exclamation that could only be uttered by someone who had escaped all the standardized systems and timetables of the world and was experiencing the first night belonging only to himself. The graphite powder from the pencil fluttered across the paper like a soft autumn breeze and brushed Minwoo’s hair. The author balled up the Kneaded Eraser with his fingers and tapped it on Minwoo's shoulders and cheeks. At that moment, sharp and transparent rays of light bloomed through the dark and dark gaps in the dark graphite, and the three-dimensional effect of the character came to life explosively.

The graphite particles of the 4B pencil used for drawing were embedded in the irregularities of the paper at the microscopic level of 0.05 millimeters. As the artist's index finger gently rubbed the paper (smudging), the cold pencil lines melted into a halftone that embraces the warm and soft body temperature of human skin. Exquisite contrast between light and dark, relief and engraving (Chiaroscuro). Minwoo in the paper was no longer a simple cartoon character. It was a real young man's body with bones, muscles, hot blood, and nervous system alive and breathing, and it was the holy embodiment of all young people who were hurt and frustrated, but eventually stood up again.

The drawing technique used by the artist's 4B pencil exudes the energy of kinetic art. Cross-hatching used to express Minwoo's leg muscles intersect at angles of 30 and 60 degrees, visualizing the explosive tension of the quadriceps muscles of the thighs. The frictional heat at the moment when the toes kick off the ground is maximized by the dark smudging effect created by strongly crushing the pencil lead. The fine graphite powder scattered on the paper drew a dynamic trajectory, like dirt on a track bouncing off the feet of a running runner.

The artist controlled the thickness and speed of the lines while holding his breath. The quickly drawn line became the speed of the wind, and the heavily pressed line became the feeling of weight spurring the earth. The two-dimensional white canvas was being transformed into a vivid four-dimensional space-time where time, space, and speed come alive through the pressure and friction of the pencil. The writer stopped holding the pencil for a moment and looked down at Minwoo's image on the paper. The dark brown grain of the mahogany desk, the pure white drawing paper, and the graphite young man breathing heavily on top of it.

It was a wonderful conversation between two souls who longed for freedom in life, going beyond the one-sided relationship between creator and creation. The dark 4B graphite marks on the knuckles of the artist's fingers were like the medals of comrades who fought together for the liberation of a young man. In reality, countless people kill themselves every morning and live as company parts. Modern people live in a prison of fear of being a failure if they do not follow a given path and of being criticized if they make a different choice than others. However, on this white drawing paper, no other people's rules or social coercion could exist.

This was a territory of absolute freedom created only by the free trajectory of a 4B pencil and the passionate heart of a young man. The writer adjusted his pencil and smiled faintly. We've just finished the first scene. The world's most dazzling and brilliant youth's declaration of independence was waiting in front of Minwoo's steps as he ran toward the night street. The night streets of Seoul encountered by Minwoo, who came out onto the ground, were a festival of brilliant colors. A wave of red tail lights and white headlights from thousands of cars pouring onto the asphalt floor of the Gwanghwamun intersection.

Warm steam rising beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows of street cafes and the warm laughter of people. After stamping his departure card, Minwoo had no set destination to go to or instructions to follow. For tonight, the absolute sovereignty of time was held in his hands, allowing him to walk wherever his feet took him. The cool autumn breeze brushed his forehead and blew his disheveled hair refreshingly. Freedom was not a great revolution. It was a recovery from this ordinary yet great moment of choosing for myself the air I wanted to breathe and walking confidently with my own two legs on the path I wanted to walk.

Neon signs on the street were pouring red and blue prisms onto the asphalt, and the blue light of Namsan Tower in the distance shone like a lighthouse blessing a new voyage. The author drew a small smile in the corner of the paper with the tip of a pencil. Minwoo's new journey was walking powerfully into the light of night. At his feet, the great independence epic of youth breaking through the oppressed yesterday and awakening was finally beginning. The wind was no longer cold, and the city streetlights illuminating his path were spread out brightly, like the most dazzling red carpet in the world.

Now the night of true freedom was awaiting him. The white drawing paper on the wooden desk was a sacred altar where a person's inner world and external reality intersect. The author's hands were creating the world like the hands of God, but at the same time, they were trembling in response to Minwoo's heavy breathing inside the paper. Who are we really? Are we just sketches on paper, passively following the trajectory of social norms drawn by someone else, or are we living artists who take up the pencil and pioneer their own next scene?

Minwoo's eyes, jumping out of the drawing paper and shouting 'freedom', were a sharp question and a spark of awakening for the artist himself sitting in front of his desk. The black lines of graphite finally began to beat as a whole life on the paper. An epic story of youth that will break all the oppressive square frames of the world and soar. The great voyage finally lifted its first anchor.