Artist: Jenny Lin

Jenny Lin is a 4th year medical student

During my senior year of college, I took a literature course that inspired me to contemplate how the human experience can be captured so poignantly by art and aestheticism. Modernist writers such as Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Kawabata, and T.S. Eliot beautifully convey elements of human life—such as love, social duty, and moments of profound sadness—through descriptions of visual art, music, or even the aesthetics of nature. I was particularly inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses, which through a collection of fragmented chapters each with a unique aesthetic approach, paints the picture of a day in the life of a common man—a day filled with experiences with which all of us can identify. In making the work on display here, I utilized the concept of “fragmentation of the whole” to attempt to show that after careful dissection we, as human beings, share a similarly beautiful architecture of organs despite our external differences.