My work
remakes high/low culture as multimedia “orientalia”, stylized
reproductions of cultural objects, images and actions that fit a stereotype,
perspective or aesthetic often associated with anything Asian which explores
how the production of culture and its byproducts constructs and typecasts
the discourse of Self versus Other by reinventing or reinterpreting what is
accepted cultural capital as private/public record with tongue firmly planted
in cheek.
So far, this approach vacillates between video installations usually of the
multiple-channel variety, conceptual projects and sculptural objects. The
video works play with autobiographical moments decontextualized and isolated
as solitary exercises of specific physical movements that become ritualized
as the result of repeated performance affecting the formal properties related
to the spatial and temporal to humorous effect whereas the conceptual projects
tend to question the nature and definition of the artistic process itself,
the primacy of the autonomous individual and related issues pertaining to
validations of what is authentic or original utilizing curatorial practice
as a strategy of alternative display through community and collaboration within
the politics of the room.
A sardonic appreciation of chinoiserie informs the three-dimensional objects
and installations which typically explore ethnic-specific and cultural issues
of voicing the other through the basic sculptural questions of form, material
and space regurgitated oftentimes as minimalist design. Such recognizably
Asian things function to embrace Western notions of beauty and form that affect
how the relationship of design and culture intersect, the juncture gridlocked
by the gravitational forces of modernism and its cultural imperative to universalize
its nature and pigeonhole its style or perception.