Artist Statement

For many years, I worked between Chinese and English as a translator, editor, and writer in the fields of Chinese medicine and culture. I thought a great deal about how meaning moves from one language into another, and about what can and cannot survive that passage. My study of Chinese medicine, my interest in Zen Buddhism, and my practice of Sogetsu Ikebana have all made me especially curious about how we relate to one another and to the world around us.

This curiosity also comes from my own experience with language. When I first came to the United States in my early twenties, my English was poor. Without language as my primary way of understanding what was happening around me, I learned to pay attention differently. I observed closely. I listened. The world gradually opened itself to me through sound, light, touch, gesture, atmosphere, and the expressions of other people. There was something magical about this process. Not being able to name everything seemed to heighten my awareness of it.

I still carry this experience with me. I am drawn to the unnamed and the unspeakable, to the moment when we recognize or feel something before we can explain it. Art gives me a similar intensity of connection and recognition. It communicates through sensation, and it arrives immediately, profoundly, and mysteriously. Painting became my way of communicating back through this realm of the unnamable.

Whether figurative or abstract, my paintings are never intended to be facsimiles of reality. They are investigations into my relationship with the physical and metaphysical world, and into how that world appears before us. Through color, line, gesture, layering, erasure, form, and empty space, elements emerge and disappear. I let under-paintings remain visible and leave areas of raw canvas remain untouched. Lines divide one space while opening another. For me, fullness and emptiness are like breathing in and breathing out; each depends upon the other.

This breath is the same breath I experience on the meditation mat. While thoughts and memories arise before me, there is nothing to grasp. Time collapses into this single breath. This moment is eternity. There is no time.

This is why negative space is never simply empty in my work. It is part of the continuum of energy within the painting. Absence allows presence to be felt; disappearance makes another appearance possible. What is invisible is the condition in which the visible becomes possible.

I think of a painting, therefore, not as a fixed image but as a field of possibilities in which appearance is never entirely settled. Through painting, Zen meditation, and Ikebana, I continue to explore this shifting space between what can be seen and what can only be sensed, between what we can name and what remains beyond words.