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.

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 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.

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.

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.