Land of Lights

Artist Statement

My work explores an inner world of stored images and reflects on the shifting space of landscape, narrative, and memory. In the context of globalization, I am interested in how any image conveys a sense of time and place specific to a personal and cultural history; drawing and painting have been the constants on which I rely to investigate these questions.

As an immigrant, I find landscape acquires meaning through memories. Through reflection and recollection, we are the subjects overwriting a landscape’s original meaning while holding the potential of all future memory. I draw and paint people in their native environments in an effort to redefine and re-establish a sense of belonging within their habitats.

My source material includes photographs, popular mass-culture images, and classical art from European and Asian traditions. Currently, I look to traditional Chinese ink drawings and Tang dynasty cave murals (Mogao Caves at Dunhuang), examining the way in which negative space metaphorically becomes a placeless-land; the flattened and sometimes ambiguous space invites an openness in which the drawing becomes an uncertain and shifting trajectory rather than a finalized representation. Through collages and juxtaposition, I re-fashion and combine images in different styles for presentation as a new whole. Each work is an open-ended formal search of personal and collective memories, emotions, and history.