Nabi (Butterfly)

Artwork ID: BBA001
Dimensions: 6.2 m (W) × 4.8 m (D) × 5.0 m (H)
Materials: 20,922 white paper cups, hand-stacked installation
Year: 2026

Description
At the center of the gallery, a vast white butterfly opens its wings.

From a distance, Nabi is beautiful. Six elliptical structures rise and curve toward one another, forming the balanced silhouette of a butterfly just before flight. It appears light, quiet, almost suspended in the air. Viewers pause before approaching. Despite its monumental scale, the form carries a fragility that makes one hesitate.

As one moves closer, however, beauty begins to reveal another meaning. What first appeared as soft wings is made from thousands of small repeated units. Each cup is light, empty, and vulnerable to pressure. Yet through repetition, they gather into a vast form that seems almost alive.

This work does not present the butterfly merely as a symbol of beauty. The butterfly has long represented transformation, rebirth, and the brief radiance of life. At the same time, it is one of the most delicate living beings. A single careless touch on its wing can leave damage that cannot be undone. It is loved because it is beautiful, yet its beauty also makes it vulnerable to capture, display, and consumption.

Nabi begins from this contradiction.

We say we love what is beautiful, yet we often fail to protect it. We praise nature, speak of life, and worry about the future, but we do not always look closely at how our smallest daily choices gradually alter the world around us. Destruction does not always arrive as catastrophe. It often accumulates through habit, convenience, and a kind of indifference so ordinary that it becomes almost invisible.

The 20,922 cups symbolize the number of disposable cups a single person may use over the course of a lifetime. Yet the number is not only an environmental statistic. It is a question about the traces one life leaves behind. What do we leave as we live? Where do the things we briefly use go after we release them? What long future is created by our short moments of convenience?

The butterfly in this work does not fly.
It remains still within the gallery.
It contains movement, yet does not move. It resembles life, yet is not alive. It is beautiful, yet unsettled. Its suspended wings ask the viewer: how long can the world we call beautiful remain in this fragile state?

The work does not accuse. Instead, it makes visible. It gathers what we have grown too accustomed to notice, what we considered too small to count, what we discarded so easily that we treated it as though it no longer existed. When these things come together and take the form of a butterfly, we are confronted with an uncomfortable paradox: what we have carelessly thrown away now appears in the shape of what we most wish to protect.

A butterfly does not remain for long.
Its life is brief, its wings are fragile, its movement momentary.
Yet because of this very ephemerality, it stays with us.

Nabi is not a monument to despair. It is a quiet request for another kind of attention. It asks us to look again at what we hold, what we release, and what we pass by without protecting.

The vast white butterfly opens its wings in silence.
That silence is beautiful.
But its beauty is also a warning.

What we believe to be most beautiful
may also be what can disappear first.

Artist Statement

I chose the butterfly not simply because it is beautiful, but because it reveals how fragile beauty truly is.

The butterfly is a symbol of transformation. Its passage from caterpillar to chrysalis to winged life has long been read as an image of hope and rebirth. Yet the completed wing is astonishingly delicate. Even a small injury can prevent the butterfly from flying properly again. I was drawn to this contradiction. Perhaps beauty does not endure because it is strong. Perhaps it must be protected precisely because it is vulnerable.

The number 20,922 was not chosen arbitrarily. It represents the number of disposable cups a single person may use over a lifetime. Before speaking of industrial waste or the scale of an entire city, this work begins with the trace left by one ordinary life. One person’s daily actions may seem small, but through repetition they become a structure. A single habit may seem insignificant, but over time it becomes a landscape.

I stacked this work by hand. The repetition was not simply labor; it was a process of counting the moments I had passed through without noticing. One cup, then another, then another. Through this act, I began to understand that the problems we often describe through statistics are in fact made of countless small choices.

This work is not meant to condemn anyone. I am not outside the life it describes. I also use, release, and forget. For that reason, Nabi is closer to a confession than an accusation — a confession about the world we have collectively made, and a small belief that we may still choose differently.

I wanted viewers to see beauty first.
Then, after moving closer, I wanted them to slowly recognize what that beauty is made of. Our relationship to nature is often not so different. We admire beautiful landscapes, but we often forget the fragile conditions that allow that beauty to remain.

The butterfly is small and delicate.
But its vulnerability is not insignificant.

It is a signal from a world we must learn to see before it disappears,
and perhaps the last form of beauty we are still able to protect.