THE JOURNAL

I didn’t plan to live in Taiwan.

I came for a conference connected to a career I’ve since left behind. Then the world closed, and leaving stopped being an option. To stay, I needed a visa. To get a visa, I needed a job. I became an ESL teacher not because it called to me but because it was the practical answer to an urgent question. That’s how most of the important things in my creative life have started: not with a plan, but with a door that was already open.

Six years later, I’m still here. I’ve had several exhibitions. I sell my creature designs at markets. I’ve built a practice from scratch in a country where my language skill is lacking, without an art school background, without a clear path forward when I arrived.

None of that happened despite the circumstances. It happened because of them.

What Being an Outsider Actually Does

Some outsider stories are all romance. The lone artist, the wanderer, the one who sees what everyone else has stopped noticing. I’m not going to sell you that.

Being a white American in Taiwan means living inside a gap. The language around you carries weight you can’t fully feel. The cultural references don’t belong to you. Social cues that everyone else navigates automatically require active reading on your part. It’s tiring in a way that’s hard to explain until you’ve done it, and it doesn’t fully go away.

But that gap does something. When you can’t coast on shared cultural fluency, you start paying attention differently. You watch how people gesture before you understand what they’re saying. You read the room in layers because you have to. You notice visual information more acutely because it’s often all you have.

For someone who makes visual work, that kind of attention is the whole job.

Teaching as Unexpected Training

The other thing that happened when I became a teacher is that I had to learn how to communicate with people whose fluency in my language was still developing. You can’t hide in jargon. You can’t rely on shared reference points. You find out, very quickly, whether an idea actually holds together on its own or whether you’ve been propping it up with familiarity.

That pressure changed how I think about creative communication. When I write about process now, when I try to explain why a daily practice works or how constraints make decisions easier, I’m applying the same muscle I built in those classrooms. Strip the idea to its core. Find the example that doesn’t require setup. Trust the person in front of you to meet you there.

I didn’t go looking for that training. It found me because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I had to make it work.

The Community You Build vs. the Community You Inherit

I have a creative community here. A foreigner artist circle that formed not because we had similar work or shared aesthetics, but because we were all navigating the same gap. Some Taiwanese friends who make things, who I found slowly and by accident. It’s real and it matters.

But it arrived differently than community does when you’re at home. No alumni connections, no neighborhood art scene with an open door. The people I make things alongside have found each other through shared circumstances first, shared work second. That order changes something.

When you inherit a creative community, you absorb its assumptions along with its support. The taste that gets rewarded. The path that’s considered serious. The work that gets taken to shows versus the work that stays in sketchbooks. Those norms are useful until they aren’t, and most people don’t notice them until they’re already inside them.

Building community by choice, from the outside, means you get to decide what it’s for before you decide who’s in it. That’s a harder starting position, but it’s also a cleaner one.

The Exhibition Wasn’t the Beginning

My first solo exhibition felt like an arrival. And in some ways it was. But what I understand now is that it was the visible marker of something that had been built across years of circumstances I didn’t choose: the visa situation, the classroom, the distance from everything familiar, the daily practice that I developed.

The exhibition didn’t happen in spite of all of that. It was made of all of that.

Your Context Is Not a Detour

If you’ve spent time thinking your path doesn’t count because it doesn’t look like the expected one, I want to push on that.

The job you took to survive that fed you something unexpected. The place you ended up that felt wrong. The skill set from a previous life you’ve been quietly ignoring. The cultural lens you carry that you’ve been treating as irrelevant to the work. None of that is separate from your creative life. It’s the raw material for it.

The artists who make work that feels like it couldn’t have come from anyone else aren’t the ones with the cleanest trajectories. They’re usually the ones who figured out how to use the specific, strange, sometimes difficult shape of their own experience. Not as a story they tell about themselves, but as actual material.

You don’t have to explain your context or justify it. You just have to stop treating it as something to overcome.

Stay creative,

Thai