My work
remakes high/low culture as multimedia “orientalia”, stylized
reproductions of cultural objects and images 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.
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.
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 poltics of the room.
Based on the ideal of chinoiserie, the three-dimensional objects and installations
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. These recognizable forms function as the found material
where Western notions of beauty and form 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.