Interview by Kes Maro
Q: What is the relationship between your paintings and their titles?
A: Each painting contains a unique piece of visual information that can be seen as a signifier since each painting is “generated” by chance. Some of these “signifiers” have a direct relationship to the information provided by the titles and some of them do not. For example, “Rain, Snow and Pine Tree” uses rain and snow as materials; “Once, There was a Drop of Blood” uses blood as material; “Two Names Inexplicably Flashes Through the Mind of Someone Who is About to Look Up at the Sky” contains two black squares instead of one...The relationship between paintings and titles can be seen as one of the three ways to interpret the show- It could also be perceived purely sensorily or conceptually.
Q: It seems like language plays an important role in your work, so what is your relationship with language?
A: While we usually think about abstract art as visual abstraction, the use of language enables me to work in abstraction conceptually. I think about language on a scale from analytical philosophy to poetry. For me, both ends of this scale could be seen as a form of art on its own- as two distinct ways of perceiving the phenomena of the world we live in and showing its complexity; one through linear logical ways of reasoning and the other through the intricate structure of adding layers of ambiguity. We assume that each of them would be a complete way of accessing the world, but for me, they have to be considered together in our understanding of ourselves and our world.
Q: How about the concept? What is the concept of your work?
A: The audiences can choose to believe whether or not there is an underlying cohesive narrative provided by the artist. If they choose to believe there is not, there are infinite possibilities of interpretation within a single title and between each title, which the audiences can generate their own interpretation through the means of their personal narrative. For example, “An Apple Is Falling, Don’t Know What It Is Going to Hit” may refer to someone’s childhood memories, the recurrent of memories before death, a symbol of science, religion, technological advancement, remarks on color, language, causality, time, etc. If we combine “White Butterfly on the Wooden Cradle”, and, “Waiting, For the next Storm to Come”, it could become a story that relates to the butterfly effect, or pose the question of what we know and what we don’t know. Both of them relate back to the first prompt of Red and White Roses, that the audience is to choose to believe what they do not have the information about at the present moment, but they know that such outcome will transform their understanding. Either outcome - red or white - could also act as a filter in transforming the interpretation of the show. For example, if it is red, the audience will bring their own connotations of the color red such as apples, blood, red heat...if it is white, it could be white butterflies, snow, marble…
In this way of understanding the concept of my work, I am rejecting the preassumptions of conceptual art as the slavery of our liner logic in sequential order. I am proposing a way of thinking that accepts the infinite possibilities of connection and relationship that contains all possible aspects of humanity through our understanding and imagination.
Q: What are your relationship to sculpture and physical objects?
A: This relates to my view of our common understanding of the structure of “physical reality”. From my understanding, I think about our mutual sense of “reality” as perceivable information on the scale of human-level perception (to different observers from each frame of reference). The reason why we think there are things or there are concrete objects that exist is because we posit these physical objects-space structured ways of understanding since the modern homo-sapien evolved. So, we have this presumption of the fixed relationship of signifiers and certain groups of information that stands out strongly to human perception as “objects”. For example, snow, apple, fire… We grouped certain information as things or objects based on some quality of such information in relation to us: the wavelength of color that stands out strongly to the human visual system and has a certain texture, temperature, sound that is perceivable to human senses. And/or that these “groups of information” pose an important function to human survival in the first place. This is only a primitive way of grouping information into things/objects. With the progress of our civilization, our way of grouping information has become far more complicated and contains a more intricate structure. I believe the relationship of concrete physical reality that is made out of objects is only relative to who posits this way of understanding instead of a “universal fact”. However, at the same time, I want to acknowledge our direct sensational identification of the physicality of things. For example, the paintings with the repetitive act of layers, and the marble with the quail eggshells on top, seem so present and so recognizable as a physical object, that is enacting our bodily emotion and visceral sensations. The sense of stillness and awe brought by physical objects from the scale of most trivial to the grandest seems at least real to me. While holding a less common view on the “concreteness” of physical reality, an unsophisticated curiosity of the very same subject is what brought me into the study of sculpture in the very first place.
Q: Why roses?
A: Why not roses?