Depiction：
Whenever my neighbors and I had a small celebration, I noticed how the children would fixate on the exact moment the candles were blown out.
If someone blew them out before their turn, a storm of tears and protest would immediately follow, so naturally we would relight the candles again and again, matching the number of children, just to make sure each one had their own chance at that single breath.
This scene was based directly on photographs I took of the neighborhood kids—I simply transported that real moment back onto the canvas.
They weren’t acting out of any understanding of ritual or tradition, but because “that moment itself was their entire world,”
and so they poured every bit of emotion they had into a single breath of air.
Sometimes I imagine that if a being existed that never grew old—forever remaining a child—then this small, passionate chaos would repeat endlessly each year.
The skull figure placed in the corner of the painting comes from that thought—
as if it has witnessed this scene again and again, perhaps even since the time when it still had flesh.
