SHHAN

I studied interior architecture at university and spent more than ten years in the design department of a department store. Around 2013, at what felt like a rather late age, I left my job and founded a startup. I took on design work across many fields and experienced countless attempts and failures. During that time I began drawing my cat Niki, and the cat drawings that started there have since grown into many different forms.

I have lived with Niki for well over ten years, and Niki has grown old. Even now, there are sides of Niki I cannot quite fathom. The unexpected things Niki occasionally does, those fleeting moments, still stir my curiosity. Niki continually reveals new charms to me and is, I would say, both the beginning and the end of my artistic practice.

SHHAN is the artist name I took from my given name, SeungHun HAN. At first, 'shhan' was closer to a personal username than an artist name. As time passed, people and institutions began calling me an artist; I capitalized the name and gave it a distinct pronunciation and logo. Around 2023, I sometimes identified myself with the black cat in my work and gave the cat the same name: Shhan.

Since 2023, I have looked more closely at the nature of what I make. I began to think about life and death, about things coming into being and disappearing, and about the traces that remain afterward, bringing those thoughts more deliberately into my work. Looking back, I have carried vague questions about death since some point in adulthood. 'Where do we go when we die?' 'If I cannot know that I have died, can that really be called death?' Questions without answers still come to me now and then. They always leave me with a sense of emptiness, though perhaps I enjoy even that feeling. Staying with the emptiness, rather than pushing it away, has gradually become part of my practice.

Perhaps that is why I am drawn to the words 'cycle' and 'reincarnation.' Perhaps I want to believe in what they suggest. Lately, I have placed these ideas at the center of my work. In 2025, I conceived Nullwood and began building a world where those thoughts could take form. Its beings, places, and objects appear through drawing, sculpture, music, moving image, and other media. Rather than a single isolated scene, it offers an entire world in which I can explore the questions I have long carried. It is work I truly love doing, and one day I hope to share Nullwood in its entirety with many people.

I did not study fine art, and I do not rely on traditional art-historical knowledge or technical virtuosity to make my work. Nor do I think of my drawings as grand statements. But I consider everything I make to be art, and I believe this is my own path. Drawing, making sculpture, and creating video, music, or digital tools are not separate pursuits to me. When a work calls for it, I will cross fields and materials and try anything within my reach. Beneath all of it lies an inquiry into life, or into death.

I grew up with Japanese animation and games of the 1990s and 2000s, as well as Hong Kong films. I never thought of myself as especially devoted to them at the time, but looking back, they shaped me more than I realized. As an adult, I also became interested in films based on Marvel and DC comics and in American television series. More than any of these, though, architects such as Tadao Ando and industrial designers such as Philippe Starck shaped my childhood sensibility. Those influences still lead me to think beyond a flat image, considering the space a work occupies and the way people encounter it.

I am not particularly afraid of trying new things or failing. My interest in crypto in 2022 and my immersion in AI in 2026 feel like natural steps to me. Whenever I encounter a new technology, I wonder what I might make with it. I bought the shhan.net domain in 2025, but it is only now, as 2026 draws to a close, that advances in AI have allowed me to build this site fully. I find it exhilarating that I can now bring an idea to life exactly as I intend, from start to finish, without having to go through a developer.

I still do not fully understand cats, nor do I know what follows death. Perhaps that not knowing is what keeps me drawing and making. Rather than rushing to settle on an answer, I want to record, in my own way, the scenes I encounter while alive and the traces left after things disappear.