Soundtrack: “Birthday” by Sugarcubes.

This animation tells an episode of a little girl’s childhood. Her parents are too busy working for a long time to spend time with her as she grows up. So she got used to playing alone – in the house, in the backyard, the sky and the grass became her closest friends. She used her childlike imagination to build a world of her own: crooked houses, animated spiders, glowing stars …… In her eyes, everything was fantastical and bright. She didn’t notice her loneliness because fantasy gently covered the void of reality.

On her fifth birthday, no one celebrated her. She gave herself the gift of the spider hidden in her pocket, and the butterfly and flower she had been chasing. Those tiny, life-affirming creatures were the truest companions in her childhood world. In this work, through bright colors, distorted space and a visual language full of symbolism, I depict how a child responds to her inner loneliness with fantasy – a world that seems gentle but with a hint of faint sadness.

This project explores a contemporary nostalgia for the early 2000s—a moment shaped by the shadow of an anticipated apocalypse.


From the looming Y2K bug to the Mayan prophecy, the turn of the millennium was thick with predictions of humanity’s end. Yet when the moment passed, nothing happened—or perhaps 9/11 became the disaster we hadn’t foreseen.

This exhibition frames 2000s nostalgia as a form of retro-futurism: a remembrance of futures once imagined, shaped by early internet aesthetics, pixelated dreams, and the soft glow of a decentralized past.


The fears, anxieties, depressions—and even the strange flickers of hope—that once defined that era have quietly dissolved with time.

I call it a soft apocalypse: an end that never fully arrived, yet left behind a subtle, persistent imprint on our collective memory.