A Gift is a handmade miniature zine I created as a graduation gift for a close friend. It marks my first ever zine, my first wordless book, and my first complete hand-bound book project.

The work grew out of a regret my friend nearly had to carry from his undergraduate years: he had conceived a short film idea, but was too swamped with graduation matters to shoot and produce it, leaving the concept unfulfilled. I decided to translate his cinematic vision into a tangible paper work in the form of a mini zine, to help him realize this uncompleted wish.

The piece is exquisitely compact: when folded, it measures just 2×2cm square. Inside, the narrative unfolds along a single long strip of 300g watercolor paper cut to 2cm in width. The front and back covers are edged with specialty paper, left completely blank of imagery to preserve a sense of mystery. The entire book is wordless, telling its story solely through visual language.

The story follows my friend as the protagonist through a dream set in the woods. It opens with a first-person encounter with a deer in the forest, then drifts through the trees in a roaming shot, before focusing on the protagonist’s feet as he climbs toward the mountaintop. In a wide shot, he falls from a cliff into a lake; at the story’s climax, his hands transform into a cluster of dove wings, and his head blooms into an unopened green plant. The scene ends as he opens his eyes and wakes from the dream. Drawing on my friend’s love of forests, the whole work is rooted in a palette of greens to build the quiet, immersive atmosphere of the dream.

I gave him the zine without explaining the narrative, leaving interpretation entirely up to him. His reading differed from my original intention, and he never realized the protagonist was himself — but this plurality of meaning is precisely what makes wordless books so compelling. At the time of creation, I had no clear definition of what a zine was. Looking back, this impulsive, friendship-driven piece stands as the very starting point of my zine-making practice.