STATEMENT OF WORK

I am interested in making art that brings the viewer into a deeper connection with the preciousness of time. I am influenced by the history of landscape and vanitas paintings. My interpretation of vanitas takes contemporary imagery as its subject: fast cars, dance music, family photographs, and common symbols of death and rebirth- the money tree, a forest, calacas, a heart, a rose, a butterfly, a rainbow. The imagery for my paintings and drawings are sourced from books and religious art of different cultures: Buddhist, Hindu, indigenous and Catholic, or more specifically the hybridized religious art born out of diaspora and migration. I pick up images from contemporary feminist queer literature and poetry the likes of James Baldwin, Yan Ge, Kathy Acker and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. I’m not interested in the original but rather, the copied, the reusable, the remembered & mis-remembered. The readymade image has a recurring power invested in over time and many generations. In the way that an ordinary object can become a totem polished by reverence, art becomes an object and a site for manifestation. Beyond this, I draw from direct observation & from my experiences being in nature, and from my dreams & memory.

Alongside my art practice, I collaborate with the writer Jennifer Tseng. Our project discusses how being mixed race, queer, disabled women informs subjectivities & desire. The collaboration in her words “raises ongoing questions about the tension between the need to tell the truth & the right to opacity; lyric & narrative powers of text & image—alone & together; & the sociality of thinking & art making. Such questions intersect with & complicate questions of multiplicity, hybridity, points of view & the ways in which time, death & culture impact our lived experiences.” So far, the collaboration has taken the form of installation, poetry, short fiction, drawings and printmaking. 

At the pauses and in-between moments, I return to the landscape which holds so much. The history and future. I return to drawing as a primary language, a communication that is pre-lingual, beyond language– bilingual, broken and complicated. It reflects my lived experience. Yet the drawings are neither autobiographical nor representational. They exist in the incommensurable space between photography and meditations on transience.