Scholastic Art

In 2026, I was awarded two regional Scholastic Art Awards for my digital art. I received a Gold Key for a portrait of my dad called Breaking Through the Noise and an Honorable Mention for a drawing of my grandparents called Look How Far We’ve Come.

Breaking Through the Noise was inspired by a photo of my dad reaching toward the camera while standing on the glass floor at New York City’s SUMMIT One Vanderbilt. The room had mirrored floors, ceilings, and walls, creating a trippy image that looked like it came straight from a fever dream. I liked the idea of my dad breaking away from all of that chaos, hence the title of the piece. The background is crowded with reflections, lights, people, and buildings, while my dad remains at the center.

My Honorable Mention, Look How Far We’ve Come, was a much calmer and more personal piece. It depicts my grandparents sitting at a Chinese restaurant, surrounded by their favorite dishes like Sichuan Boiled Fish and sea cucumbers with mushrooms. They have been together for 55 years, and both grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. My grandpa was sent to work on a farm because he was a college graduate and considered to be over educated. Later, they immigrated to the U.S. and built a new life while keeping their traditions alive.

Those traditions have become part of my childhood. Every Lunar New Year, they give us red envelopes. My grandma often makes dumplings by hand, and on birthdays, we eat long noodles for a long life. The drawing represents not only how far my grandparents have come, but also the family and traditions they have carried with them.

Having both pieces recognized at the regional Scholastic level was especially meaningful because they came from people and moments that are personal to me. The awards reminded me that some of my strongest subjects are already part of my own life.

Are We Fish?

One TED Talk I watched recently was Four Billion Years of Evolution in Six Minutes by Prosanta Chakrabarty, an ichthyologist who studies fish, evolution, and the history of life on Earth. The talk starts the question that if humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? Chakrabarty explains that the question itself is based on the misunderstanding that humans evolved from the monkeys alive today. In reality, we only share common ancestors with them.

I liked his explanation that evolution is not a straight line because it is more nuanced than the diagram where an ape gradually becomes more upright until it turns into a modern human. That image makes it seem like evolution was always heading toward humans. Chakrabarty instead describes life as a huge branching tree. Every species alive today is at the end of its own branch, and humans are only one of millions of those branches. His image reminds me of iTOL, often known as the Interactive Tree of Life. It is a website used to build evolutionary trees and one I used in my Diptericin research. I utilized iTOL by inputting sequences of amino acids for different fly species into IQ-TREE and then graphing it visually in iTOL using the .treefile files. 

Chakrabarty even goes so far as to call humans “fish.” He pointed out that the first vertebrates were fish, and every later vertebrate group inherited that ancestry. Our backbone is one piece of evidence connecting us to that much older history. This TED talk describes Chakrabarty’s main argument as showing that humans are a small part of a roughly four-billion-year evolutionary process, not its final result.

The talk made me think differently about what it means for humans to be “advanced.” Evolution does not have a finish line. A species survives because its traits work well enough in its environment, not because it is moving toward some perfect form. Humans may have unusual abilities, but we are still one small branch connected to an enormous history of life that started billions of years before us.