Through my work, I intend to delve into my existence's social and cultural condition, exploring the delicate relationship between outer objects and inner subjects in our time. As an artist, I choose to work primarily with clay, a material that is both malleable and vulnerable. With heat, it transforms, vitrifies, and becomes something rigid and long-lasting. This process mirrors my own existence, where vulnerability and resistance coexist, and where we are all susceptible to decay and change. Tranquility, similar to clay, can only be found through the trial of flame and trauma. I create distorted, surreal forms with light and shadow to acknowledge the vulnerability and susceptibility of our identity. Through deconstruction, I investigate, confine, and confront our role as receptors passively driven by outside stimuli. My work is the omission of my observation over the temporal space amongst the complexity of humanities and the diversity of cultures between the East and the West.
My work and I exist in different "modes," without one mode truer than the other, formed by my quests through cultures and languages. These "modes" camouflaged, or what Édouard Glissant would call "creolized," my registers, senses, and identity. Within these modes, the camouflaging process becomes a self-widening and self-enlarging voyage of seeking acceptance. I drew inspiration from the restless exploration of cultural phenomena by immersing myself in social and cultural conditions. My ontological process is to deconstruct human experiences into the relationship between egos and objects. The deconstruction often generates absurd forms and installations that echo my ambiguous identity. The deduction of idiosyncrasy also granted space to allow the intention and the meaning to wove and intermingle in this postmodernist world where the boundary of representations becomes increasingly more perplexing.
As a person, I grew up in a family constantly searching for their belonging, moving from one city to another without many permanent possessions. This nomadic existence left me without roots, forever an outsider. The question 'Where are you from?' often brings a melancholic pause before I can compose an answer. In each new place I move to, I inadvertently create a new identity and self to fit in and be accepted. Art-making has become my way of grappling with my reality's uncertain and ever-changing nature, a path-caring tool to cohesion in the aftermath.
Education
2015-2017
Rhode Island School of Design, M.F.A.
2009-2013
Luxun Academy of Fine Arts, B.A.
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