Artist Statement (500) Su

Ideally my work will manifest itself only onto a flat rectangle or square, that is, either a painting or a photograph. This constrained form gained its utmost importance from my teenage years, when I was relearning how to see the world through a scientific, mathematical eye. Horizontal and vertical, the ideal two axes x and y meeting at perfect right angle, represents the rational way of looking and thinking. The rectangular or square two-dimensional surface abstracts and compresses the actual, living world, the four-dimensional space-time continuum to its ideological limits, the most rational form.

I see this as an analogy of how we gain knowledge, the world existing as a virtual, digitalized matrix in human mind. But I also remember another kind of knowledge from a time before I must assign cold numbers onto every single thing in my life. I remember one time I was woken up by my grandma at night, got onto a shuttle bus, not knowing where we were going. The darkness outside, the starless sky and scattered window lights from houses on the horizon burnt into my memory, my earliest memory. This other kind of knowledge, the empirical one, reminds me what life really is. I am most human when I experience confrontation between these two kinds of knowledge.

And this confrontation is what I hope to bring into my work. I work with various subject matters, from personal, everyday experience or from scientific discoveries or theories, transforming both into an in-between form of representation. But no matter the source, I want to maintain a kind of opacity in the meaning of the finished picture. This is a two-folded intention. On one hand, I want the picture plane to remain a neutral ground for the viewer to meditate on. On the other hand, I’m attracted to the inherent irony in the attempt to fully communicate knowledge, either scientific or empiric. If the viewer gets from my work something valuable, yet different from what I put into, my task is accomplished.

I’m currently working on two separate bodies of work. The first one is a series of panel paintings. I'm incorporating photo transfer into the painting process, collapsing personal images onto patterns of color theory. This meeting of two different, yet equally important imageries is one example of the absurd confrontation between the two kinds of knowledge. The second body consists a series of photographs. I’m using a photogram of a 3D model of tesseract (a four-dimensional hypercube) as an index to contextualize all the other images, which are mostly representational, mundane photos. By putting an idealized, imaginary image together with the rest, more realistic ones, I’m hoping to question the meaning and the existence in both.

Gerhard Richter once said something like this in an interview. “At some point you have to convince yourself that painting can change the world. Otherwise the act of painting is pure idiocy.” I believe in the value of my work to shift people’s minds. Towards where? I don’t know.