What is the color of Seattle? When you think of Seattle, you probably come up with several big-name corporations like Microsoft, Amazon, and Boeing. You might think of dark Starbucks coffee, or the rain falling from the cloudy sky. So the color of Seattle might be achromatic like gray and black.

However, the color of Seattle is a multi-layer rainbow for me. The city is very diverse, composed of various people with different cultures, foods, languages, and spiritualities. All these people have tried to accept and mingle with each other to make the real Seattle. So, I think Seattle is a well-mixed hot pot with various people’s life stories.

I decided to use the dice to depict the city of Seattle because its skyscrapers always remind me of black dice. (If you line them up, they look like black buildings with white lights.) While I mainly used black dice for buildings, I used multiple colors of dice for the clouds and rain showers, representing new and multiple cultures.

As a Korean-American who has spent half of my life in Seattle, I would like to show the city as a culturally diverse place, like the life stories of its citizens. Also, I would like to share a little secret hidden in this artwork. You might observe the hidden word “Life” depicted by the dice, if you look carefully enough. 🙂

—Chankyo (Chris) Kim,16, Washington. He believes that art is an excellent tool for self-expression as well as communication with his community. He loves experimenting with diverse media to create various forms of visual arts: paintings, mixed media, animations, and political cartoons. When he is not working on his artwork, Chris avidly builds and programs with his robotics team, plays musical instruments, and practices Taekwondo. In addition to his artistic interests, he enjoys playing video games in his spare time while watching political, preferably unbiased, news. Below: Folkart from Central India.