The utopian promise of improvement celebrated during the heyday of modernity has devolved in the postmodern digital age to a detachment from real life and lived experience. The discontent that underlies the generations born into the fast-faced contemporary world has become the main subject of my work. My series Aphasia explores these feelings of alienation […]

My photographs fuse a gothic sensibility with performative elements and traditional landscape imagery, in order to explore the metaphoric potential of the environment. My most recent project was shot while on solitary kayaking and hiking trips along the Delaware River Valley, using a medium format camera and basic camping supplies. In many works, traces of […]

In 1946, when Chairman Mao’s forces broke their truce with Chiang Kai-Shek’s and began battling once again for political control of the country, no one in China could have predicted what their homeland would look like 60 years later: a landscape where high-rise apartments are steadily replacing old family compounds, where newly purchased cars are […]

For his fourth exhibition at New York’s Lehmann Maupin Gallery, photographer Juergen Teller presented his recent body of work entitled Ukraine. Along with four other artists, Teller was commissioned by the PinchukArtCentre to interpret the country for the 52nd International Venice Biennale 2007, where a selection from this series was first shown.  The New York […]

The first time I went to a reenactment pageant, I didn’t know exactly what I was going to see, but I had been told that people in a small town in Wyoming had been dressing up like settlers and Indians, and acting out a story from the pioneer era since the 1940s. I decided to […]

Expectation is seldom a good idea. I arrived at John Alexander’s retrospective at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts without prior knowledge of his work except for a few five-inch-sized reproductions I’d seen on Artnet.com. (True to my generation, I am an unabashed participant in the magical method of “just google it.”) Online I saw […]

My focus is the message conveyed in the artwork instead of the form of the piece, whether it is an oil painting, a traditional photograph or digital photograph. What matters to me the most is the thought in it. Or shall I say, the emotions, which are intertwined with my life experience. As for the […]

The distinctions between noise, sound, and music is central to my work.  I rationalize these distinctions as the perceptual nuances between hearing and listening as modes of auditory reception. Through lo-fi yet seemingly complex assemblages and installations, I attempt to isolate moments where noise is perceived as sound and sound is perceived as music. Noise, […]

Bricks in China have a long history. The traditional golden brick was for royalty use only. Everything about the material and production was extremely meticulous. A fine golden brick had a melodious sound when tapped, smooth as silk when touched. That was why one golden brick was worth a fortune. The word “golden” didn’t mean […]

My work frequently incorporates common, everyday things. Many of these things are what we call fanshii in Japanese, a word that originates from Japan’s great admiration for Western culture. Fanshii things are said to be odd (in that they are neither Western nor Japanese), kitschy, girlish, and tacky. Living in Japan, I am very familiar […]