The Flatland Dream: Source

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Society often perpetuates a rhetoric that feels the need to tightly link personal achievements

and creative expressions to the inherent conditions their creators are born with. In the media,

it is always an “autistic,” “neurodivergent,” or “intellectually challenged” individual who has

“managed” to create something or push the boundaries of a field-framing their success as

an exception rather than a testament to their talent. This subtle narrative can have deeper

implications, potentially diminishing the significance of their work while reinforcing the biased

assumption that such individuals inherently have a lower creative output, which is simply

not true. There is a need for change within the rhetoric. Each creative individual is an artist,

musician, writer, craftsperson, first and foremost. What they have happened to have been

diagnosed with comes secondary to their work itself.

ABST is currently an organisation that creates art exhibitions focusing on collaboration

between the students of NLCSJ and youth autistic/disabled artists in Korea. It stands for

Art Beyond Some Thresholds, a way of stating that personal expression, and all its various

mediums, transcend the artificial boundaries that some create based on certain disabilities.

The title for this year’s exhibition is “The Flatland Dream”. It is a reminder that an artwork

is simply an aspect of oneself projected onto a flat canvas, serving as a landscape of ideas

that define one’s individuality. It also serves as a reference to the book “Flatland: A Romance

of Many Dimensions” by Edwin Abbott. The novel portrays a two dimensional world in which

individuals are strictly divided based on the number of sides they consist of, and serves as a

satirical reflection of our own society, and its countless attempts at dividing people based on

a multitude of factors. I hope the Flatland Dream gets to serve as inspiration for us all to look

beyond the lines we draw around one another and to celebrate each work simply as a window

into a unique mind. All it takes is a shift in perspective to appreciate creativity as it is