Joy Hsiao

The word for “kiss” in Korean, 뽀뽀, caught my attention due to the repeated characters, the symmetries within each character, and together as a word. I saw the fractal-like geometry in the characters immediately and created the fractal, Infinite Kiss, that magnifies the patterns seen in the word. This work was created in Microsoft Excel using the golden ratio.

The following three Chinese words, 木, 林, and 森, mean “wood”, “woods”, and “forest”, respectively. The word “forest” is written with three characters for “wood”, stacked together in a pyramid formation, and appears to be the beginning of a fractal tree. So I first generalized the word "forest" to a "Forest of Order n", then I further generalized it to a 3D forest made with twigs and yarn.

Mathematicians and philosophers have long studied the truth-value of statements and had invented paradoxical statements like, “This statement is false,” that is false if it is true and true if it is false. While studying Korean, I was intrigued by the number-like vowel, l, and consonant, 0. When written together, 0l, has several meanings in Korean including the number “two”. It also looks like a two-digit binary number that has a mathematical value of one. Putting them together, I created an equation shown in Figure 1 that is both TRUE and FALSE at the same time: 0l = 2 is TRUE in Korean, but FALSE in mathematics. Figure 2 shows two true equations: 0l in Korean means 2 while 0l in base 2 is 1, or 일 in Korean.