The composition stages a dialogue between imperfection and wholeness. Warm, broken arcs trace an orbit that never completes—echoes of external standards, deadlines, and roles. Inside, a full circle assembles from discrete particles; its integrity isn’t given, it’s accumulated. The contrast frames the quote, “One can only rely on oneself to be complete.” The rainbow gradient marks the many states we pass through—joy, doubt, growth—before coherence emerges. The work claims that completeness is not the world closing around us but the self aligning within.

This project inspired by Chinese history,Farewell My Concubine (1993), is a tragic gay love drama set amid war, political upheaval, and the shifting tides of 20th-century Beijing. The story of Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou blends opera, love, betrayal, and survival. The phrase “人，得自個兒，成全自個兒” (“One can only rely on oneself to be complete”) is deeply relevant. Dieyi devotes his life to Xiaolou, but in the end, he cannot depend on love, loyalty, or society for fulfillment. The tragedy shows that only by facing oneself—identity, pain, and truth—can one find dignity, even in despair.

From this assignment, I learned how to use p5.js to animate particles so they scatter and then form a circle. I practiced using arrays, smooth movement with lerp(), and adding rainbow-colored text. I also learned to use a GUI to change text, colors, and save the sketch as a PNG. This showed me that coding can be creative and a way to express ideas.