Artist’s Statement

Landscapes of Presence

My life as an artist has been committed to creating work that combines Eastern and Western attributes, giving rise to an unfamiliar wholeness. Western art is about the subject, the individual, and Newtonian fragmented reality, while Eastern art is more about context, the group, and wholeness. In the beginning of this series, I was interested in working with familiar and familial objects. I was seeing pattern on pattern as a way of expressing the background as subject—making subject and background inseparable and equal. Later in the series, I began to explore the feeling of wanting to be more connected to my family and its history—to bring old memories into the present and make them new; to give them renewed expression and life in the present.