22.19%
There is one habit I took for granted for years. My Art teacher in elementary school always asked us to draw a border around every worksheet before we began. Four sides, a 2B pencil, repeated each session like a ritual that required no explanation. The rule was never explained, and because it was never explained, I never asked. I did it, and then I forgot about it.
I only remembered it again in Yogyakarta, sometime before Overexposed began to take shape.
I was attending several contemporary art exhibitions at the time, and among the many works I encountered, there was one tendency I kept noticing in the practice of some younger artists. The presence of borders, margins, frames within their work, not as functional edges but as part of the visual language itself. As if the boundary between image and non-image was being deliberately preserved, even celebrated. I did not immediately know what I wanted to say about it. I only took note of it.
That note stayed in my digital archive for quite a while, about a year, before I eventually reopened it and started paying it real attention. Somewhere in that gap, the memory of elementary school surfaced again. Two things that seemed unrelated, the observation in Yogyakarta and the memory of a 2B pencil, suddenly found themselves in the same room inside my head. And that is when a real question started forming, what exactly does a border do to an image?
This kind of incubation is not new to my practice. A lot of ideas need time to find their own shape, and forcing them too early usually produces something that feels dishonest. When I finally returned to that note, I began going through the found images that have long been the primary source material of my work, but with a different focus this time. How their compositions treated the margin, and what that margin did to the meaning of the image as a whole. Not as a technical question, but as a narrative one.
That is where the research started finding a more concrete direction. Going through the old photographs I had collected and studied, I came across one piece of data that caught my attention. The average border on photo prints from the 1980s and 1990s occupied approximately 22.19% of the total print area, based on the average default print size used by photo labs at the time. That figure, which I initially encountered as a technical fact, turned out to carry far wider implications. It gave me a mathematical foundation to build something I would eventually call Dynamic Border, a margin system that is not static, but scaled proportionally to the size of the linen surface in each individual work.
The result is a border that seems to respond to space rather than simply contain it. It did not arrive as a purely aesthetic decision. It arrived from a calculation rooted in the history of photographic reproduction. And precisely because it is rooted there, it feels more honest than if I had simply chosen it by intuition alone.
What I did not anticipate was that the deterioration on those old photo borders would turn out to be one of the most relevant elements to the broader themes of Overexposed. Yellowing, fading, the discoloration caused by age and light exposure, none of that needed to be hidden. They are the most honest record of time passing. When I noticed how the border of a photograph from 1987 had yellowed unevenly along its left edge from repeated light exposure, I realized that process was far closer to the subject I wanted to speak about than any technique I could have consciously applied.
Rather than avoiding or sanitizing those traces of time, I chose to integrate them as part of the aesthetic vocabulary I was building. That deterioration became part of the visual language of Dynamic Border, sitting alongside the mathematical proportion that formed its foundation. Both were speaking about the same thing. Time leaves marks, and those marks are information.
Within the broader context of Overexposed, Dynamic Border is not only a visual element. It became a narrative device that reinforces the album's ideas around exposure, time, and memory. It marks an important shift in my practice, an attempt to connect historical and personal dimensions into the formal language of painting without having to announce it explicitly. The border is there. A viewer can overlook it entirely, or they can find themselves wondering where it came from.
Looking back, I see Dynamic Border as a reflection on how lived experience, whether significant or seemingly trivial, can transform into genuine visual thought. A rule from elementary school that I never questioned, an encounter with younger artists' work in Yogyakarta, a figure of 22.19% found in the technical archive of an old photo lab, and the yellowed edge of an old photograph I happened to be holding on an unplanned afternoon, they all ended up meeting at the same point. Not one of them was planned to meet the others. In art practice, I have found that not much is truly lost. Most things are simply waiting.