The title of this piece comes from an academic essay of the same name by Seongsook Moon. The origin myth of Korea begins with a bear who yearned to become human. She and her tiger companion asked the Heaven God to turn them into human beings. He gave them a challenge: to eat nothing but mugwort and garlic cloves for one hundred days in a cave, and with their piety proven, he would grant them humanity. The bear persevered while her tiger companion chose to flee. The bear was turned into a beautiful maiden who wed the son of the Heaven God, and gave birth to the first king of Korea. 

I wanted to center the sacrifice of the bear woman while also legitimizing a different way to be a woman, a tiger who chooses to live in the way that she exists, choosing freedom over suffering. In addition, I sought to render the bear in a traditional East Asian style, sticking to a simplified East Asian color palette, characterized proportions, and plain, paper-like background. Where the tiger was constantly present in East Asian paintings, her counterpart, the bear is rarely seen.