Hi, I'm Johnson, a PhD chemist who cares about sustainability. That's how I would have introduced myself in a past life.
Growing up, I loved art. I wrote, I painted, and in my senior year of university I sat in my first photography class, not knowing it would quietly stay with me for years. But where I come from, in Taiwan, art was rarely seen as a real career, especially for "students with good grades." Anything creative was treated as entertainment, something to enjoy in the gaps between the subjects that supposedly mattered: math, physics, chemistry. So I followed the current everyone was swimming in. My love of art shrank into a pastime, and in the pressure to earn prestigious degrees and impressive titles, even that began to feel like a waste of time.
Scientist became my identity. After more than ten years in universities and the letters "Dr." in front of my name, how could it not? It was a path full of hope. We were taught that our mission was to create impact, to take what we learned and make the world a little better with it. For a long time, that was enough.
And then it wasn't.
An imbalance had been growing inside me, slowly at first, then too large to ignore. I realized I still wanted to create, but in a way that had nothing to do with a lab or a paper or a reaction mechanism. That realization shook me more than I expected. It also left me with a question I couldn't put down: why do we treat "artist" and "scientist" as two separate identities, as if a person has to choose one?
It wasn't always this way. Many of the scholar-officials of ancient China were also celebrated poets, expected to be as fluent in verse as in governance. Leonardo da Vinci was a brilliant engineer and an extraordinary artist, and he saw no contradiction in being both. Somewhere along the way, we drew a hard line between observing the world and interpreting it, between measuring beauty and making it. I'm no longer sure that line was ever real.
So I decided to find out for myself. Is the path from scientist to artist still possible today, in a world that likes its labels neat and separate? There's only one way to answer a question like that. You test it.
I quit my job and started this photography business.
If it fails, it fails. At least I won't spend the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if I'd been brave enough to try. This is the journey within, the one where I stop asking permission to be more than one thing and start finding out who I actually am with a camera in my hands.
Thank you for being here at the beginning of it.
(Photo by Danielle Bennett, a photo of me hiking in the dark is quite fitting I thought)
