And then there is a time in life when you just take a walk: and you walk in your own landscape.
Willem deKooning

I am a painter and frequent traveler who encounters space as unfurling gestures and tactile marks. Painting becomes a mode of travel, its destination a landscape that contains the whole of lived experience—both light and shadow.

Exploded pours of paint determines the initial compositions in my paintings. To their improvisational shapes and translucent colors I add images and idioms from places lived or traveled, particularly Asia. The multiple points of view, stacked spaces and expressive brushwork in Chinese painting are a major influence in my work. Walking through an Asian city immerses me in a landscape that combines 1960s LA and contemporary Manhattan, fusing childhood and adulthood together. This is exacerbated by not speaking Mandarin, which conjures the silence of my formative years (when I did not speak until 4 years old). Such factors flatten the spatial dimension and heighten the visual sense, as if roaming inside a traditional Chinese scroll. Contingencies such as pours, collage elements and gestural marks create space for imaginary wandering that is liberated from a single vantage or image.

Compressing space into shallow layers of paint conveys the experience of compacted global culture, a simultaneous field from which disparate paint applications emerge and dissolve. This fluctuating space makes room for Yuan Dynasty landscape, 1960s LA, Brooklyn construction sheds and Dr. Seuss to co-exist in a world that operates between reality and dream.