About

Artist Statement

Losing my father at a young age has been motivating me to ask what it means to be a human. With the idea of interdisciplinary art practice, I work across painting, drawing, printmaking, performance, and installation. The essence of my investigation is to unfold the question in the child's mind and take a step forward - to examine humans' bodily and spiritual relationship to the universe.

Coming from a background of printmaking studies, my practice roots in, if not always, the techniques, but often the conceptual anatomy of this traditional agent to knowledge. Some examples are repetition, multiplicity, layering strategies, process as a method, matrix making, and flat-to-sculptural conversion. Materially, I adapt printed matters to suggest daily encounters, employ book-making mediums to indicate the assemblage of things and work with ephemeral substances like dust, natural light, and paper to emphasize the dynamic status of nature. 

A repetitive body silhouette appears frequently among my works. It exists in different forms or is made with diverse materials. Frequently, it composes a large fabric or pattern where the many individuals transform into a social structure. Sometimes, it stands alone amidst the space and encounters the viewer. Many change their form into abstract or two-folded figures that appear mysterious. When making the shape with mirroring materials, the body can function as a portal that takes you inside and simultaneously a surface that reflects reality.

The presence of this body is unstable. In the work Mom, Can I Have A Brother, the presentness of a baby suit signifies the absence of the being. When making works like The Overlap Pattern With Grids, The Variability of Measurements, The Transformed, and Wombs, the boundary between the positive and the negative space among the connected humans is blurred. 

This blurriness corresponds with the notion of softening the barriers of dualism. The semi-transparency nature of the vellum extends the blur. Most recently, I have created The Disappearance of Self and From Afar, each incorporating three vellum layers. I assembled the former work by taping down the mapping vellums on the lower surface to simulate the complexity and obscureness of a human's mind. The later work uses wax thread to stitch together the sheets, causing them to be inseparable. If each Vellum layer represents an aspect human perceive from nature - in these examples, they are the self, the social structure, and the sky - then the overlap that blurs the images asks us how to understand their relationships.

Grids, symmetry, and mandalas are intriguing patterns that point at infinity. Grids stretch in space by growing larger or shrinking smaller, suggesting the similarities between the macro and the micro world. Symmetrical composition assists the idea of self-mirroring of one's inner cosmos. To deviate from extreme perfection, I always break the symmetry with a dynamic background or subtle intentional marks, which often need to be inspected closely. 

The execution of these calculated patterns reveals my affection for mathematical aesthetics, intelligently developed by Minimalism, abstract, and conceptual painters and sculptors. This aesthetic also connects to the idea of meditation. A mandala contains ritualistic functions among several ancient and modern cultures. For Tibetan Buddhists, it is a contemplation tool. A Tibetan mandala represents something beyond a flatland, and that is the architecture of a spiritual dwelling. Likewise, my work constructs the diagram a human interconnects with, and it is capable of expanding.

Its transformational attribute speaks of the same fact of life passages in reality. We exist in a liminal space, and we are always in the process of making history. Mathematical aesthetics is my grounding approach to this idea. When drawing, I usually limit myself to twelve colors with red, green, yellow, and blue hues. I apply colors inside or outside the grids following self-made rules, such as rotating the color wheel ninety degrees clockwise and applying the opposite color above the previous layer. Eventually, the painting process becomes a meditation. The iterative process documents my performance from moment to moment and responds to history's irrevocable progression.

Through the character Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera claimed that "the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate… They are the questions with no answers… it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence." 

Hence, I built my artistic praxis upon the question initiated by the nine-year-old.