STATEMENT OF WORK

My current work explores abstraction through the aesthetic experience of Chinese Scholar's Gardens. Inspired by researching East Asian art history and cultural studies during my bachelor's degree and later visiting numerous traditional gardens across China's Jiangsu region while working in Shanghai, I find profound value in these spaces' conceptual premise.

Hidden beyond bone-white walls, the Scholar’s Garden is revealed only in passing. Countless passages and planes, distant and near, are framed within labyrinthine pathways, zigzagging cobblestone, and meandering streams. Walking through, the experience of the garden is cohered only through fragments: delicate flowers existing in impermanent beauty against void-like backdrops, scholar's rocks creating microcosms of illogical landscapes—mountains, waterfalls, moss-covered fields—all held momentarily before dissolving. At center, a vacuous lake, a recessive yin: the heart of the garden left vacant, yet within its void, a reflection of all things around it. 

The Scholar's Garden embodies contradiction – decorative yet philosophical, present yet empty – which I translate into painting. Within these walls, form becomes experience, psychology, attitude—the logic of a painting itself. I improvisationally paint this garden as it unfolds into spatial choreography, alternating between macro and microcosmic views through deliberately confused scale shifts. Points of view shift along snaking corridors; states of matter disintegrate as rolling hills evaporate into abstracted atmospheres. Forms stack into gravity-defying lattices, teetering and balancing to their own logic. Negative space becomes positive and positive back to negative as paths turn right, left, up, and down. These spaces present an infinite visual economy of impossibilities. 

My paintings explore the tensions between building and breaking, presence and absence, creating a visual language that embraces multiplicity. I use rich layers of oil, collaged canvas, and hand-made papers to structure this experience. The ground acts as both backdrop and activating force: a void of bare canvas and airy washes contains the entire cosmos, mirroring how gardens extend infinitely beyond their white-washed walls. Collage both constructs gnarled materiality and cuts into this emptied surface, splicing in ruptures of windows into varying moments, imageries, and histories clashing with differing speeds. Beyond assembling parts into a unified whole, I pursue the entanglements occurring in between.

Positioning fragments of personal history, mark-making history, and abstract painting's broader legacy against a blank backdrop, I aim to present abstraction as something as challenging as it is beautiful. Cannibalizing these inner workings and languages, I center change, the tension and contradiction within it, inside the poetic space of a garden.