Artist Statement

MOVING BETWEEN WORLDS

I have always existed between two aesthetic worlds without fully belonging to either. My formal art education in North America and the UK during the mid-1990s to 2000s, gave me a rigorous foundation — but it always felt slightly borrowed. The aesthetics that actually fired my imagination came from elsewhere: Japanese anime and manga, commercial graphic design, the restless visual energy of popular culture. I absorbed both, and neither cancelled the other out.That tension is what my work is made of.  The figures in my paintings are distorted — stretched, mutated, strange things growing out of bodies that no longer conform to any recognizable whole. This is not distortion for shock alone. It is my way of pushing figurative painting into uncomfortable territory, merging a Western painterly tradition with a visual sensibility that was never quite institutional, never quite orthodox. The result unsettles people in different ways: Western viewers tend to find it disturbing in a way they’re drawn to; Asian viewers often recognise the pop cultural grammar but miss the conversation happening with painting history. Both reactions tell me something is working.I think of this strangeness as “plasmatic” — bodies that refuse fixity, forms that resist being pinned down. There is something deeply contemporary about this refusal. We live in a time that desires mobility of identity, the freedom to not be defined by a single origin or a single appearance. My figures act that out literally on the canvas.The distortion is also, I admit, a private joke — a mockery of my own education. The alien growths, the alienated bodies: they are my way of questioning the authority of everything I was taught to call fine art, and everything I was taught to keep separate from it.