KO/EN

Central to the search for ars vitae, or the art of life, is the question “who am I and how should I live?” This has been a perennial conundrum of mankind ever since we developed self-consciousness, and is one of the central subjects of religion, philosophy and literature. In ARS VITAE Volume 2, we posed the question to writers and artists from various walks of life: What is a true self and how do you attain it? The answers we received are truly wide-ranging. An artist describes it as a process of letting go of worldly concerns and emptying himself. His art is about erasing all the words on the newspaper with a pen and a pencil. A corporate CEO talks about the experience of facing himself for the first time in his life when he was abruptly let go by his company.