My work explores how the actions and the decisions we make impact our environment and the way we view our surroundings, ourselves as well as others. My current work was begun with the theme of the human condition and its aesthetic and emotional relationships. My studio practice explores these relationships through the integration of painting, drawing, and sculpture, and animation.


Most recently, I’ve worked on investigating the concept of home and the process of forming an emotional connection to a place or environment. Having lived in and absorbed foreign cultures, this idea of home and attachment of place has informed my practice. The elements involved in forming a relationship to a place and calling it homehave always fascinated me. I take inspiration from random, seemingly insignificant interactions in daily life, the written and spoken word, and the observations in my immediate surroundings. Such moments are felt, observed and abstracted, finally creating a visual dialogue rendered in either the second or third dimensions.


For my water-based paintings, images are built through brushwork, suggesting both Chinese characters and the expressive, gestural work of the fifties and sixties American East and West coast painters. The brushwork is layered in a network of marks, pours, drips and splashes, then overlaid with graphic ink lines referencing Asian landscape painting, finding a structure within chaos while connecting Eastern and Western traditions. In some instances the resulting structure is created three dimensionally, utilizing previously discarded paintings and combining traditional Korean and Chinese papers.


In other instances an initial structure or moment is created three dimensionally that I experience and re-live through the painting process. Compositional elements from both the Italian High Renaissance and early German expressionist horror films are appropriated to manipulate perspective and re-examine previous ephemeral social interactions.


I view this integration of methods and the ongoing dialogue as an exploration of the transient, empathetic nature of our relationship with culture, environment and individuals. The initial forms, found in the interaction between colored pigment, water and paper, referencing elements and experiences from cultures I’ve called home, function as both narratives and structures reflecting an emotional experience.