Email : jsuhzine@gmail.com

Hi, thank you for visiting my website.

I’m JAY(je-i), an illustrator based in Japan mainly focusing on picture books and travels.

Since leaving Korea, I’ve spent a few years in Chicago and Auckland during my early 20s, but I have mostly built my life in Japan over the past 20 years.

My creative journey is probably nothing you haven’t heard before.

I loved making things, but I didn’t follow the traditional path of becoming an artist. I didn’t train for art school entrance exams – which, in many Asian countries, can be quite intense – and when it was time to make decisions about my future, I felt I had to take a path that looked more practical.

Then, for a long time, drawing felt foreign to me, like someone else’s unreachable dream.

Still, art kept finding its way back to me.

In my twenties, I would sometimes sketch when something caught my eye. I also joined a few exhibitions as a hobbyist, and traveled through Europe partly because I wanted to visit art museums and stand in front of paintings I had only seen in books.

And even though I didn’t yet know how to build a life around it, creativity never completely left my life.

I was drawn to creative people and creative environments, and later worked alongside designers, illustrators, and people who shaped ideas into experiences. I spent time in a design company, and also worked with software used by people in animation, architecture, and design. I was always near the act of creating.

Then life changed.

I became a mother, and the shape of my days changed completely. Around that time, the design company I had expected to return to after maternity leave no longer existed. I found myself standing at a crossroads: whether to go back to a corporate job, or try to build something of my own.

I had already been writing my blog for several years. Readers were coming back, and it gave me a place to begin. It was unsettling, but I wasn’t starting from nothing.

As I wrote more, one day I decided to try drawing a small character for my work. I picked up the iPad I had bought for digital drawing 2 years earlier – the one that had mostly stayed unused.

It was a small beginning, but as the days went by, I couldn’t stop drawing.

That same year, I gave myself a project: to make my own calendar. I drew twelve illustrations in one month. They were awkward in many ways, and the calendar was just for myself, but finishing it taught me that I could keep drawing.

Since then, I’ve been exploring both digital and traditional mediums – from iPad drawings to colored pencils, oil pastels, watercolor, and whatever else helps me give shape to the images in my mind.

I draw from a tiny corner of my home: half of a five-tatami room, roughly four square meters, that has slowly become my little studio filled with countless materials.

My work is inspired by travel, memories, motherhood, and everyday life in Japan. I’m drawn to hand-drawn textures, warm colors, picture-book-like scenes, and the quiet emotional weight of ordinary moments.

I am still on my way to becoming creative.

And my journey is about finally giving those images a place to live.

Mediums and tools

– Color Pencil, Pastel and Watercolor

– Procreate, Photoshop, Illustrator

Exhibitions

– International art club group exhibition – “Big cats”, Color Pencil and Pastel, 2014, Chiba, Japan.

– International art club group exhibition – “The universe, the city and my home”, Watercolor and Procreate, 2024, Chiba, Japan.