School of Creative
Industries
Lee Junha
Junha amassed much of her rich experience and learnings while working with children from socioeconomically disadvantaged and dysfunctional backgrounds. Her journey took her to a social service agency and a counselling centre in Singapore. Throughout her training, Junha leveraged on her background in BA Fine Arts in order to pursue a meaningful journey.
As part of the MA Art Therapy programme, Junha worked with children by providing both individual and group art therapy sessions. This opportunity served to broaden and deepen her clinical understanding and practice.
Junha portrays her subjective experiences and feelings in abstract forms. Recently, she has been interested in containing the perception of growth in her professional identity in fluid forms through her art.
Work
To hold a potential
Ink on paper, wooden frame
46 x 155 cm
2023
The black ink on Korean paper portrays unwinding complexity and tranquillity, while the paper depicts the theme of identity. To hold a potential captures the slow expansion of ink, which contains the puddle created on the white paper. It represents the artist’s transforming identity towards becoming an adequate container.
The wooden frame stretching the thin Korean paper symbolises the artist’s identity as a painter, which complements her present developing identity as an art therapist. She attempts to convey her identity as an artist and art therapist, refusing to distinguish between these two.
This work celebrates the artist’s professional growth, mirroring her subjective experience of holding the space, fostering transparency and bracing vulnerability.
Thesis abstract
Response art and bullying: Transversing the countertransference landscape and fostering a safe therapeutic alliance
This qualitative phenomenological heuristic study aims to highlight a self-introspective practice as a method to cultivate quality therapeutic alliances. The practitioner-based visual heuristic inquiry of multiple case vignettes explores an art therapist trainee’s engagement through response art. Response art was used to determine and illustrate the process of expounding accounts of countertransference that emerged during individual art therapy sessions with clients. Using response art created after art therapy sessions, the researcher engaged in an intuitive and spontaneous approach to deeply explore her understanding and her clients. The researcher adopted a self-reflexive approach to foster a safe therapeutic alliance in trauma-informed art therapy with children who have experienced bullying in Singapore. This study examined how countertransference supports the development of a safe therapeutic relationship in the context of trauma. The researcher demonstrates the importance of a self-reflexive practice to identify and process emotions and nurture a positive therapeutic alliance with clients.