“May the parents of Katherine Huang please report to Ikea’s customer service center,” blared the loudspeaker as tears streamed down my face. After my Swedish meatball binge, 6-year-old me walked alongside my mother through the labyrinth of showrooms. She continuously reprimanded me to not wander off, but I found it hard to resist poking and prodding everything within reach of my stubby arms. While my mother stopped to pick out shelves, a catalog of blueprints caught my eye and demanded my attention. The first pages were filled with incomprehensible letters from unknown languages, but I was determined to decrypt their meaning. The English instructions were difficult, but I moved on to the Mandarin and Spanish translations, which I understood even less. Although I didn’t comprehend most of what I saw, my mind was lost in the intricacies of language. While the shopping trip was quite a traumatic experience, I became drawn to daydreaming and exploration.
For instance, I became an avid reader at an early age, devouring A-Z mysteries and Goosebumps novels at an unreasonable pace compared to the check out limit. Books expanded my imagination and fueled my knowledge. Soon, I graduated to Verne’s fantastic adventures and Woolf’s modernist narratives, which provided much-needed sustenance for my imagination. I built worlds from accounts of island adventures and Victorian remnants of English society.
When I ran out of books to read, I scoured my home for cures to my boredom, which led me to discover old medical textbooks. I was enamored with how “Spondylo-” rolled off my tongue and the countless types of “-itis” that one could possess. I took a liking to the field of healthcare. “Bring your kids to work” day became the highlight of my year as my mother let me examine the ebb and flow of bacteria under her microscope. Before my eyes lied a vast kingdom rich with purpose and life. The closer I got, the bigger it seemed. The natural world astounded me with its spectacular universe of form and color invisible to the naked eye.
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Simultaneously, my appreciation of beauty translated into my art, which served as an outlet for my overactive mind. As my interest evolved from crayon stick-figures, I worked on refining my art through research into history and different techniques and mediums by taking advanced art classes in and out of school. Art grew into another world that I could investigate for countless hours.
Creating art also frustrated me. Before I made a piece, I envisioned all the ideas and symbolism I wanted to convey, but the result didn’t always match my expectations. Despite the urge I felt to give up, my failures in creating art forced me to step back and examine my mistakes, so I could learn to re-work my approach; using a different brush size to create cleaner lines, adding a blending medium to prolong drying time, etc. My artwork not only serves as a form of self-expression but as tangible representations of self-discipline and dedication.
Art and medicine; my two passions could not have been more polar. It wasn’t until last summer that I reconciled the two fields while reading an article where medical professionals developed observational skills through art analysis. The realization struck me… For all my artistic passion, I never fully embraced art’s capacity for empathy, problem-solving, and creativity that also forms the foundation of quality and innovation in medicine.
Whether in dissecting the root of an illness or pioneering a surgical technique, it’s enthralling to recognize the implications of art beyond museums; I can apply my existing art knowledge in my pursuit in the medical field. Often, I find that the sensation of getting lost preludes new paths of discovery. Exploration has diverged my path from the comfortable and ordinary. I am no longer that scared little girl in Ikea, but what remains steadfast is my unfettered curiosity and love for discovery.
