Name: Subin Hwang
Nationality: South Korea
Birthday: 28 January
Interests: Football, European culture & languages
안녕하세요, hello, szia, bonjour! My name is Subin and I am a student from South Korea. I'm greatly interested in the diversity of this world, especially of Europe and its culture and languages. You see, Korea is quite a big country with one official language. But those countries have just a few milion population, yet they all have different languages? That fact was mindblowing to me as a kid! And people I met here are also surprised whenever I tell them about it, too! Therefore my interests were skewed towards the smaller, central/eastern side of Europe than the bigger, traditionally more popular countries on the west.
Since my major interest is in the former Eastern Bloc countries, I'm majoring Hungarian in college! It's a truly unique language I've been especially interested since I was younger. I'm also learning French too. As an outsider I can offer a unique perspective, so maybe my language skills could help connect the two sides of Europe in the future? I must practice hard until then!
Thanks to my interests, I naturally fell in love with football! I love to know about the clubs, the leagues and competitions in each country, the fan culture, the colourful collection of club crests…everything about this world! But I especially love the lesser-known, "niche" stories more than the biggest stars and headline stories. Of course I don't know everything about the world, but I sure love to see my college mates who know geography but don't know football get surprised whenever they say "So this country has its own league too?" and I show them the livescore app!
I'm a supporter of Nottingham Forest! We're not the best team in the Premier League, but that makes every point extra precious. (I guess that's why I always root for the underdogs in major competitions…)
Drawing was my hobby ever since my hands had the strength to grip a pencil. I love watercolour because it has a unique texture. Painting requires a lot of focus, but mixing colors is relaxing. As I gained more skill and confidence, I found the joy of painting abstract patterns and shapes in backgrounds.
What kind of art do I want to make? I want to tell stories with my own unique view. This lifelong goal to develop my own artstyle was inspired by my best friend HJMT. (He's an amazing artist, please check him out!) My style was heavily inspired by children's book illustrations and Eastern European posters from the Soviet era(like these). I also like putting a lot of references, so if you know the meaning of those things, you'll enjoy my art more. So please keep your eyes wide open—you may find some more things than it first seemed! I just draw football and HJMT's characters these days, but I often get my original character ideas from mythology and folklore.
But ultimately, I draw and paint to express my love and gratitude towards the things that are so important to me in my life. So recently seeing all the positive reactions towards my football art has meant a lot to me. Thank you, everyone, really!
If you want to repost my art, please ask me for permission first and you must leave credit! Please do not edit my art in any way(no cutting / using a photo filter / using in a video). Using my art as a profile picture is fine, but please leave credit also.
I'm Korean, I mostly speak English online, I study Hungarian and French, but my personal symbols are actually related to Sweden! I briefly studied Swedish around 2020 because I wanted to learn another language and Swedish looked the easiest because it looked a bit similar. So I naturally also got interested in Northern European culture, and eventually Viking art. This was also the period when I started building my online presence.
My red dragon signature was inspired by runestones. Specifically, the Urnes style dragon motifs found in Swedish runestones from the 11th century. My username "Listifax" is just a meaningless jumble of words found in the the Swedish dictionary. I wanted a nickname that no one else would've used before. Also, the maroon color I often use is #801818(Falu red).
The painting on the top of my blog is The Sun by Edvard Munch. It's one of my favorite classical paintings. It doesn't fill the screen in bigger monitors, I just copy-pasted a custom HTML code from somewhere else years ago and I don't know how to tamper with it.
I first made this blog in 2020 and started to use it as an art collection in 2022, but I didn't really write anything here. But after I gained some positive online attention by sharing my Nottingham Forest drawings and found out more people who are interested in niche football stories like me, I decided to more actively share my own stories to the Internet. So please enjoy your stay here!
Written 2024-07 / Modified 2024-08