Navigating the In-Betweens

Physical memory and personal fables; emotional impulse and pensive introspection; aesthetic pleasure and conceptual puzzles; While endeavoring to be self-aware in life, I’ve found myself in a perpetual pendulum-dynamic, oscillating back and forth between contrasts of the waking world and the vagueness of mind and spirit. It is as if I exist as two entities. My one self encompasses body and action, one that ages and experiences all that is reality. My other self is a mirror into the depths of my morality, imagination, and subconscious. This is the self that connects my corporeal experiences to fantastic visions, and instigates ideology; this is the self who reminds me that accepting things as they are is never enough, and urges me to question the meaning of my life (although ready-made answers are never there). My meditations upon life’s endless folds of flavors and secrets are governed as a streaming dialogue between my two selves, bridging the gap between the palpable and the ineffable. The same conversational dialectic also motivates my art-making process. Like the swiveling dualism of my life principles, my means of making art is an exercise in following the guidance of contrasting magnetisms. I acquire initial inspiration from the flash associations my mind creates between things derived from my physical senses and visual ideas collected from a fanciful subconscious. These momentary image relationships are sparked from emotional gut-reactions to physiological stimuli, as well as my innate reflex to correlate worldly observations to fleeting glimpses of my own narrative fantasies. From the infrastructure set by my physical self’s seemingly arbitrary visual knee-jerk impulses, my internal self begins to build a path to seek meaningfulness. The artistic process of expressing my imagined associations serves as a vehicle in which my two selves can pursue their existential rhetoric, and visually execute their (my) see-saw propulsions between reality and ideology. My artwork seeks to reconcile the dissonance between simple gravitation to the aesthetically pleasing and the human urge to make symbols out of objects and prescribe to them a character of profundity.

Some perceive the body as a mere shell for the richer qualities of the soul, but in my own spiritual ruminations I have found that such an opinion dismisses many insightful sensations prompted by physical experience. By tuning my own awareness to focus upon my five senses, I am able to uncover a plethora of personal emotional connections to the things I encounter in the world. However, my mind empathizes most strongly with the physical senses of sight and touch. The two senses are also often interlinked, wherein during my observation of my surroundings, I am able to “touch” things by seeing them, and certain textural feelings instigate emphatic concentrations of emotional uprising. Upon seeing linty fabric, I feel compelled to run my hand over its surface, and I also have a habit of petting particularly “cute” patches of moss, because for some inexplicable reason I instinctually assign them with quirky personalities warranting to be cherished. On the other end of the emotional-response spectrum, the textural appearance of porous surfaces instills in me an insurmountable feeling of fear and disgust. Merely looking at sponges up-close, skin cells under a microscope, honeycomb hives, coral skeletons, and (especially) clusters of barnacles makes me feel like peeling off my own skin. One aspect of my artwork seeks to illustrate this array of synesthetically induced emotions. I aim to visually fabricate textural forms to instigate specific emotional responses from viewers by elevating meticulous composition and lush technical detail. For example, in my illustrated narrative The Allegory of the Sandwich, I tell the story of a knight’s quest through an enchanted forest to collect the ingredients for making a sandwich. I wanted to portray an environment that was impermeable and imposing, feral and dangerous, but also imbued with a sense of chaotic beauty and mesmerization. Inspired by the English countryside that I had then-recently traveled through, I went to the local library and borrowed several field guides to plant species found throughout the country. Mimicking their scientific illustrations of various bushes, herbs, and flowers I contrived my own wild habitat of black ink and fantasy. The convoluted texture and painstaking detail of every cluster of accurately depicted foliage contributed to a build a visual manifestation of emotions ranging from fear to awe. The repetitious labor of drawing each leaf and steam truthfully also served as a meditative vehicle in which I could contemplate the symbolic significance of the nature represented in the graphic novel, which once more laces back to the discourse between my physical being and my internally mirrored self; a compulsion to seek the reasons for my own body’s inclinations.

The Impressionists sought to capture the fleeting riches and ghostly nuances of light cast on the world. They devoted their passions to an arduous routine of returning to the same landscapes and objects over and over in repeated endeavors to paint the ever-changing, immortal essence of light. I find that in my own process of art-making, I practice a similar discipline. However, while the Impressionists engaged themselves to the ephemeral perceptions of external landscapes, my art turns to observe the internal realm of my imagination, illuminated not by sunlight, but by daydreamed corollaries of images and concepts; I seek to capture the flickering glimpses of narrative “impressions” my mind generates reactively to my corporeal experiences. Like the impulse that incites imagistic emotions from textural empathy, my mind also makes flash-associations between my material perception of things in reality and morsels of impromptu fantasies. These may be the initial phantom forms of characters, narrative scenes and settings that are triggered into nascent being. The core concept of a knight going on a quest to make a sandwich in The Allegory of the Sandwich, for instance was born of my study-abroad experience in Oxford. I was attracted to the city’s medieval aesthetics, particularly the concept of knighthood. For yet another inexplicable reason, I deeply admire the visual design of armor, as well as the moral imperative of being a chivalrous knight. Studying in Oxford made me begin to connect my experience not only to my admiration of knights but also to the visual and gastronomical pleasures offered by the numerous artisan sandwich shops in the city. Hence the two concepts collided unexpectedly in my thought-process and resulted in the quirky image of a boy-knight eating a large sandwich. But why knights? Why sandwiches? While my physical self admires the concept for its simple charms, my cognizant other yearns for a more cerebral expression. Through the contemplative and repeated process of sketching out the knight protagonist and the components of his sandwich, the cogs of my mind continued to turn and make connections to other conceptual ruminations. I eventually deconstructed the initial idea into a symbolic language system where various images within the image represented different abstract notions: the armor symbolized violence and human construction, the sandwich ingredients were derived from a metaphorical setting of nature, and the making of the sandwich itself represented the compromise between human civilization’s ideals and mankind’s inherent natures. By attempting to reconstruct my original image using these newly loaded symbolic components, I ended up illustrating a narrative allegory exploring the facets of the human condition.

Try as we may, I believe there are things about being human that will forever remained irresolvable. Aesthetic inclinations are one such aspect of humanity that tantalizes my personal Rubix complex. Why do I adore owls as opposed to pigeons? Why does listening to Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade Movement I” make me imagine a girl riding on top of a levitating manta-ray, navigating through storm clouds? Why does food inflate my urge to illustrate images, and frustrate me when I cannot summon up a good enough “meaning” for its depiction? Like the gentle ineffability of the universe when the dialogue between my body and my mind turns to inquire the purpose of life and existence, my devotion to art making strives to uncover purpose in the aesthetic while knowing full well that said “meaning” will remain elusive. By retreating into my own fantasies and fabricating my own “meanings” for my aesthetic creations, I am able to gauze the aching for truth, but for a transient moment of satisfaction. Perhaps my passion to the process of making art is compelled by a subconsciously persistent hope and Sisyphean commitment to discover some fragment of truth embedded in my own existence and being.