STATEMENT OF WORK

My ongoing painting series, Night is Purer Than Day, is rooted in the lasting concern for existing between the seeming absolutes of nowhere and everywhere. Drawing from my diasporic experiences as a 1.5-generation immigrant – having spent equal amounts of my life so far in China and Canada – this series settles on nightlife as a way through which to re-address feelings of uncertainty that have informed my identity since my teenage years. Based on digital documentation from my life and travels, the scenes capture universally recognizable experiences of human exploration, relying on the night as a space of fluctuation between known and unknown, seen and unseen. 

In this series, I am interested in creating images that embody both closeness and distance – recognizing the disorientation of living in a state of constant uprooting and finding comfort in the unplaceable. Just as leaving is often a privilege compared to those left behind, non-belonging becomes a conscious choice that acknowledges the fluidity of one’s relationship with the world. Depicting night-time scenes of public and private spaces in Vancouver and beyond, these paintings employ a saturated palette and heavy contrast to express contradictory feelings of welcome and alienation, reflecting on my own diasporic experience of wanting to belong to a specific place or group while resisting assimilatory patterns. 

Viewers encounter the works through a placeless point-of-view, as the depicted figures and environments similarly traverse a state of liminality. Fleeting between anonymity and identification, the subjects themselves are simply implied in the television glow on a red-eye flight, the shoes standing in front of DJ equipment, or a wristwatch reflecting the glow of cocktail glasses. With these snapshots, I seek to translate my own plurality, of being known while finding solace in aspects of ourselves that are fundamentally unassimilable. Referring to a children’s game of hide and seek, D. W. Wincott similarly reflects in a 1963 essay: “It is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.” For me, this desire and comfort in non-belonging is equally an act of sovereignty as it is a consequence of hyper-globalization.