a tender awakening — an interdisciplinary visual art series

Living with Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome (PMOS, formerly known as PCOS) has transformed my body into a site of confinement, grief, and resistance. In a world that routinely neglects women’s pain, chronic conditions such as PMOS are often minimized despite their devastating physical, psychological, and social effects.

With no known cure, PMOS continues to affect 1 in 8 women worldwide whose suffering is too often misunderstood. My work emerges from this tension between invisibility and survival, examining how structural neglect shapes the female body and identity.

After years of medical consultations and extensive research, I searched for art that could reflect the realities of living with PMOS. I found very little. That absence became the foundation of a tender awakening—an interdisciplinary visual art series, developed between South Korea and the Philippines from 2024 to 2025, that confronts the silence surrounding women’s chronic suffering.

Created in collaboration with Filipinas diagnosed with PMOS, the project expands across experimental film, sculpture, artist book, zine, and video installation, the work documents the body with care, vulnerability, and honesty through intimate image-making and experimental visual language, reclaiming representation for women’s bodily experiences and autonomy.

This project insists that art must do more than aestheticize pain; it must offer recognition, tenderness, and solidarity. There may not be a cure for PMOS, but there must be art.