ARTIST STATEMENT

I do not hesitate to translate my emotions through my artwork.  Painting as life's metaphor is interesting to me and it can manifest in either shaped canvases or by incorporating sculptural forms into my paintings.  Introducing sculptural elements to the works transforms not only the outer appearance of the pieces, but also the fundamental structure of my shaped-canvas paintings.  I have explored relief techniques involving the edges of my work, and elaborating the pieces with a variety of materials and mediums, always using a painterly attack.  Through multiple layers, which create radical surfaces and add a quality of three dimensional forms, this new technique easily lends itself to a sculptural element in the work.  Although primarily non-objective and non-representational, I consider my work to be an intensely subjective response to the various aspects of the painterly reality around me: lines, colors, figures, and shapes.  These geometric shapes and calligraphic gestures, in the overall complex relationships with other figures and spatial elements, play in curiously ambiguous ways as counterparts.  I did not begin by employing pre-determined symbols; nor have I intended to abstract them or abstract art.   For there is a conscious artistic will and subjective selection of images; I begin with an "image," which I move and turn around until it is transformed into a form that departs greatly from the initial images.  I leave the meaning and interpretation of the work to the free aesthetic choice of the viewer.

As a postscript I would like to say--that though I cannot over-emphasize the importance and influence of Western art and aesthetics in shaping my artistic direction, nor can I deny or ignore the strong workings of my Eastern cultural roots that inherently nurtured my aesthetic taste and inclination--all art forms being faithful mirrors of one's cultural landscapes..