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Statement
My Living through continuous developments
in the psychological understanding of the contemporary human
condition, I repeatedly ask myself "How is my cognition and
experience of the world different in the presence of technology?"
Spending more and more time in the realm of information screens,
sometimes I am unsure of where I stop and the world outside
me begins. Screens take my passive body anywhere within seconds
while passwords open windows through which arrows direct my
mind. We use passwords to access anything of importance, take
pills to modify our psyche, and use invisible parts of our
planet's atmosphere to ceaselessly communicate. Brought by
the presence of technology, the sense of territorial expansion
results in isolation. Duality of being - my experience of
presentness and remoteness, predictability and randomness,
order and chaos - is conveyed in my paintings as a visual
negotiation of a new paradigm.
The act of painting is my deepest
inquiry about contemporary psychological landscapes. It is
through the act of making that I contemplate and process my
dependent relationship to technology, and reflect on a different
kind of communication. Looking at the most basic computer
symbols I see a continuous and endless number of clicks. Dots,
circles, lines, crosses, arrows, … networks … departing onto
canvas where it all disintegrates to become a psychological
map, to become a hand-made document of a presence in time,
to become a mark.
My recent body of work called Password:
Sign Disintegration is a contemplative allegory about contemporary
psychological shift in technology-driven, information-dependent,
overstimulated society. My desire is to expand and complicate
these ideas with images that are suggestive of naturally occurring
shapes and patterns (nets, maps, neurons, stars, globes…),
in dialog with shapes generated from human-produced, artificial
world (passwords, data bodies, computer symbols, pills, networks…).
I hope viewers will first notice the painterly quality of
the surface, the sense of openness and generosity of mark
making, and, only after close inspection, the conceptual underpinning.
The intentional multiplicity of interpretations of my work
parallels the multiplicity and complexity of psychological,
cognitive, emotional, and spiritual states in our civilization.
The majority of my new paintings are
predominantly white - drawing in the form of painting. My
desire to make paintings that resemble a blank piece of paper
(as tabula rasa), and function as a diary of daily overlapping
entries, required alchemical painterly experimentation and
innovation. My primary painting process is preceded by the
laborious and careful preparation of a gessoed surface on
canvas over panel. I am using pencils, graphite, color pencils,
pastels and hardly any oil paint. This process allows me to
alternate multiple layers of drawing with thin applications
of gesso, resulting in an appearance of complicated depth
while retaining a smooth paper-like surface. The absence of
the traditional visual pleasure of paint accumulation is a
strategy of inventing new ways to painterly satisfaction.
Although one can uncover a sense of
disconnectedness and isolation in my new work, I consider
the act of painting to be a constant attempt to connect and
communicate. I hope to honor my viewer with a reminder of
the immeasurable quality found in the immediacy and spontaneity
of human mark and touch. Rendering perfect, utilitarian, and
timeless signs by hand is a consequence of my desire to access
an imperfect, contradictory, time-bound being on the other
side of a screen. The sublime out of technology. .
Currently lives and works in: SF Bay
area
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