One day in Seoul’s ostentatious Myeong-dong neighborhood, I walked past a shop selling cheap accessories, and I felt a strange emotion at the hundreds of earrings hanging under white light bulbs and the customers with their baskets of accessories. There was too large a gulf between those earrings and the ‘works of art’ I had spent weeks creating at the workbench, but the customers picking through the accessories seemed somehow similar to me. The most expensive things in the store might have cost 3000 won. Things stuck together with glue, things that make your earlobes itch if you leave them in too long, fake gemstones, the shiny things filling my jewelry drawer, the only luxuries I could afford with my thin wallet.