The star studded sky, shooting stars, photosynthesis, clouds, reflections on the deep sea, window panels, and even phenomena of colors that are white and hazy…How can we capture the variety of things in the world through drawing and to also reveal something different? When attempting to illustrate the world, the story is not the chosen narrator of my drawings; instead, I choose for the process of the drawing to speak. The realm within the drawing is a world that knows no contemporality or tradition, as it speaks a process of lasting eternity.
If you take a closer look at the parts with the color white in the images, you will discover a world of rich possibilities, and during my process of art making, I always focus on incidents and things that appear rather insignificant. Some think that this attention to detail is rather neurotic, but what I am hoping to do is to open up a world of boundless sensory imagination.
The color white is often the starting point for my thoughts, as it has become a habit of mine to think while facing a blank void, and this is incorporated in my approach to process art, emotions, and even sentiments. Therefore, I regard white as a crossing of sense and sensibility, which is synonymous to art’s irrational rationality.
The artistic technicality with drawing has long been a subject of extensive challenge, and this technical aspect is something that I am not willing to forgo. My practice of art can be regarded as a form of highly technical graffiti, with the drawing techniques and details not intended as an assurance for the existence of the story. Without a complete sketch, my drawings are not just merely composed of colors being filled in, but rather, they weave together gestures and natural techniques related to the practice of drawing. In which case, the production process of the imagination becomes the subject. The behavior echoes anthropological concepts, and the technique applied represents advanced or traditional historical or contemporary indications. I often employ traditional drawing methods but strip them of their traditional attributes, with a question targeted at all things in the world: What is real, and what is the reality of drawing?
White seems to belong in the category of “nothingness”, but I’ve decided to preserve the details of abstract, figurative, story-based and not story related details within these nothingness. I envision that these aforementioned terms to be of little significance in the drawings. Sometimes, I also approach drawing in ways similar to sculpture and writing, and thus traces of drawing with features found in writing are observed, with the focus placed on the artwork’s margins and distinctive layers. By including these attributes, it is my intention for the image within the frame to not be so easily categorized and to be able to fully utilize white’s notable quality of being “something within nothing.”
I am still in the pursuit of a state of stillness, and I find that the appeal with art making is that it allows for the departure from the current time being into a state of blank void without the order of time. I’ve spent an extensive amount of time contemplating about this. The way that drawing layers, compiles, and then compresses time all at once is a process that I am deeply fascinated by.
There is a great distance between drawing and reality, as it belongs in the world of imagination in an unrealistic manner, with everything in drawings seemingly fictitious ¬¬– is the white luminescence coming from the white background or created by the paint; it is not light or anything else. I’ve grasped these notable features of this blank void, and at this present moment, am trying to open up the space between my thoughts and these illusions.
Perhaps, the best way to face a drawing or any other artwork is to return the self to ground zero, and imagine that you are the color white, figuratively yet also imaginatively.
