The representational power of images in contemporary culture and the symbolic potency of that which is strategically hidden or missing from view is the focus of my work. Adopting an illustrative style and drawing from a stockpile of mediated images, my recent paintings allude to the complex and entangled ways in which we picture others and ourselves. I appropriate the tropes and traditions of portraiture in an ongoing attempt to represent and articulate subjects hidden from view-disguised by the covering of the hood.

My work addresses the problem of building with paintings. With modular construction as the central quotation, I use panels and pigment as “prefab” systems that create new spatial relationships within existing architectures. I am deeply committed to the following ideas and address them in my practice: 1. Repetitive work, such as drilling, pouring, sanding, and measuring, is the labor of industry, and art making is an industrious job. 2. It is possible that repetitive honing by hand may imbue a work with more humanity than a large painterly gesture.

My paintings explore the line between abstraction and representation with the use of appropriated source materials such as stamps. The repetitive application of the stamps into clusters or groupings recall the abstactions and distortions of the body as well as flora. The works are executed in a graphic, minimal style but still allow for a certain playfulness to exist.

Starting as a landscape painter, I found myself creating mysterious places that hovered on the edge of reality. Filled with lush vegetation and dense forests, I played with scale and space while relying on a base ground of gestural abstraction. These landscapes evolved, as I began to include figures and create scenes dealing with the contradictions of contemporary life where no one is real.

My work examines issues related to genetic engineering, biotechnology, and commercial agribusiness. I use appropriation, translation, distortion, and redaction to reframe corporate messaging. Through drawing and collage, familiar biological and scientific imagery is recontextualized within a twenty-firstcentury framework.

My egg tempera paintings feature a female figure whose body is decorated with a hot pink, flowery, pattern reminiscent of embroidery that associates her with extreme femininity. The paintings incorporate plants and animals, domestic objects and symbols that reference culturally familiar stories and images. Medical illustrations of the head are appropriated and modified into archetypal images of women in a dream state. The animals and plants are chosen for their symbolic associations and lend the female figures a contemporary, feminist inspired Snow White character.

I try to clear my head and begin each painting with no destination in mind. Lines and circles connect and move freely across the surface. Then I move from chaos to order by embellishing the lines with dots and colors that reflect the emerging theme of each work. Meaning emerges as I near completion of the painting. The results often resemble the very large or the very small, organisms on the cellular level viewed through a microscope, or satellite images of Earth landforms and bodies of water. Painting is how I connect to the world, large and small.

He is currently working on a series of paintings Paper Money. It is the reminiscence of the culture that he was born. In the first stage of the development, he extracts the abstract qualities of the depicted objects; reveals the primitive essence of the subject. The experiment presents the representational images with an abstract prospect. In these paintings, the object that he depicted is paper money, which is made to communicate with gods or underworld spirits in traditional Taiwanese culture. In the early period of the series, the paper money has been singled out from its ritual setting.

These paintings originate in an interest in the alchemical transformation of materials and the processes and forces that control material phenomena. I use a very specific palette, taken from a wide variety of natural sources in the landscape/environment, flora in particular: reflections in water, festering storm clouds, young fronds, sugar cane, exhausted foliage, flowers, lichens, soil. The colors, which I rigorously match, are blended on site. I take the samples into the studio, where I mix larger quantities of matched colors.