On Success

In the art world, success usually has a face. Museums. Biennales. Invitations. Being seen. Being named. Being included. There is a clear image of what success should look like, and it is repeated so often that it starts to feel natural, even inevitable.

But that image was never mine.

I didn’t become an artist because I wanted visibility or recognition. I didn’t even know what those things meant at the time. I just needed to make something. I needed a way to stay alive, mentally, emotionally. Art was never a plan. It was a necessity.

Somewhere along the way, I drifted into a system. I didn’t jump in. I didn’t decide. I just adapted, slowly. I watched how others spoke, how they positioned themselves, what they showed, what they hid. Without realizing it, I started adjusting too. Wanting to belong. Wanting to be taken seriously.

Then one day it hit me: I had been here before.

It felt disturbingly similar to my life in advertising. Different language, same structure. Visibility. Relevance. Approval. The same quiet pressure to perform, to stay current, to be legible. Only now it was framed as art. As culture. As value.

That’s when success started to feel heavy.

Success can become a trap when it slowly replaces your own instincts. You begin measuring yourself through external signals. Invitations. Silence. Responses. You start asking the wrong questions: Am I visible enough? Am I relevant? Am I doing it right? And without noticing, you move further away from whatever made you start in the first place.

I don’t believe in purity or total freedom. No one is outside systems. I don’t romanticize that idea anymore. But I do believe in movement. In not settling too comfortably inside any structure. In being able to step in, step out, pause, disappear if needed.

For me, something shifted when I stopped holding so tightly onto the word “artist.” Not rejecting it, but loosening it. I realized I didn’t want to perform being an artist anymore. I wanted to live, and let making come out of that — not the other way around.

Success, now, feels quieter. It has more to do with honesty than achievement. With being able to sit with uncertainty without rushing to explain it. With accepting contradiction. With not forcing meaning where there is none.

Sometimes I don’t know why I make work. Sometimes I don’t know if it matters. I’ve learned to stay with that not-knowing instead of trying to fix it.

When joy appears, it’s brief and unannounced. It doesn’t feel like a reward. It feels more like recognition — not from outside, but from the body. A small signal that something, for a moment, is aligned.

Money matters. Stability matters. I’ve learned that the hard way. But they don’t answer the deeper questions. They don’t tell you who you are or where you belong. When they become the measure of success, they tend to push you back into the same patterns of performance and conformity.

For me, success is simply this: the ability to continue without becoming rigid. To keep making without turning it into an identity I have to defend. To allow myself to change, slow down, or stop, without feeling like I’ve failed.

Maybe success isn’t a destination. Maybe it’s a way of staying close to what feels necessary — even when that necessity is unclear, unstable, or impossible to explain.