As an artist I take an inter-disciplinary approach. Working predominantly within multi-media installations - both site-specific and non site-specific, I create environments in which people can walk into and interact with. Within these installations, I have incorporated video, sound, performance, digital imaging, and drawing. The raw materials I use may range from cotton batting, sheep's wool, and plastic bags to fabricated steel forms. My work is very conceptual and at times minimal and terse.

From 2002 until 2007 I made drawings, paintings, multiples, performances, and audio works based on the failed 1984 movie Supergirl. I saw the movie once. I now organize my studio practice around the play Timon of Athens, written by William Shakespeare between 1605 and 1608. It is generally considered to be Shakespeare’s most difficult and obscure work, and is the only one of his plays not performed in his lifetime. I don’t valorize failure in my work. Rather, failed projects provide me with empty cultural bandwidth within which to house my own subjectivity.

I maintain an interest in exploring the relationship between painting, drawing, and printmaking within my practice. By combining these mediums I begin to combine the three and in return it becomes reminiscent of urban noise. The pieces that are being created posses various tensions, such as man versus machine, labored craft versus gestural, and abstraction versus representation. Through the combination of various mediums I am placing my energy outside of the body and onto a surface that relates to a chaotic mentality.

I find inspiration in a great variety of places: traditional folktales and children’s book illustrations, vintage wallpaper patterns, fashion magazines, nature, and Scandinavian folk art. Often the characters in my paintings come from strangers I spot on the street who, in passing, appear to be on important time sensitive adventures that I don’t understand. I like contemplating and exaggerating the range of possibilities in strangers’ lives, and for the same reason, I create open-ended narratives.

The arguably simple question “Where are you from?” can be tricky to answer these days. Identity as a concept tends to morph when linked to geography, citizenship, ethnicity, and race, and this shift strongly affects my work’s imagery as an Asian American living in the Deep South. Taking cues from both Eastern and Western images, folklore, art histories, and popular cultures, my art features cultural landscapes that look simultaneously familiar and strange. I twist and hybridize these sources to tell new stories about various global lives.

Walking through the Louvre in Paris, one would think the tourists were more interested in having photographic proof of their encounter with the Mona Lisa, than with actually seeing it first hand. Scores of people view the entire museum through the LCD screen of their video recorders. It seems obvious that the experience is of its reproduction, yet there the tourists stand, before the actual object, consciously rejecting it in favor of a reproduction and oblivious to the difference. I incorporate this perversion of priorities into my own work.

My desire to explore the human experience via the metaphor of landscape led me include figures within nature. I hope that the viewer sees a metaphysical sense of place in these images. The natural landscape serves as a backdrop to human action, and the emotions conveyed tap into grand, universal themes. I case my models as archetypes and they in some way have lived these roles. On reflection, I realize that these cinematic paintings depict people facing the most elemental conflict in nature—life and death—and that they ask more questions than they answer.

My paintings and constructions investigate the “look” of digital information as it is transmitted, providing an overabundance of stimuli and, therefore, distractions. I create abstract works that reference conversations, usually a direct communication between two people. I wonder how a simple conversation is absorbed by people, how they’re connected, and what the conversational wavelengths would look like. The main idea is to create abstractions from conversations, as if you could see sound waves from analogue and digital devices passing through

The places portrayed in my paintings are silent studio settings and scenes inside my home. I am inspired to make these paintings by the light acting on everyday objects and the geometric relationships that are found in the contemporary interior. These kitchen paintings offer an intimate view of domestic life. While I am working in front of these simple scenes my thoughts drift from family, to spirituality, politics, friendships, fears, etc. The making of these pictures helps me sort things out and find an anchor in the beauty of my surroundings and the simple physicality of objects.

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.