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Miraculously Wonderful
We just took a family trip to Japan. It was quite overwhelming—catching up with an old friend, spending time with my family, making new friends, visiting breathtakingly beautiful places, enjoying exceptional food culture. Now I’m back home being greeted by new pieces in progress. The fruit trees which I planted last year are growing, showing the unstoppable cycle of life around me.
It’s crazy that all the things we cherish fall into right places more or less when we know that things could go wrong in so many ways. Nothing could be planned to be the way they turn out, but we do find things to be miraculously wonderful sometimes. That’s how I want to work in the studio too.
#74, 24 1/2″ x 24 1/2″ x 57, painted resin, 2011-13
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New Addition to the Site, February 14, 2023
Three pieces have been added to the sculpture section of my site under 1995-2006.
I’ve worked with roofing tar quite a bit. It is cheap and readily available at hardware stores. It comes in two versions, shiny one that runs smooth and one with fibers in it which is more malleable and less shiny. Both can be diluted in solvents. They react in interesting ways with oil paint. It cracks paint when you apply on top of it, making cracking patterns on the surface. It can be thinned to be used to stain porous surfaces. The rich warm black is nice when it’s used as it is. When it’s thinned it makes beautiful brown. I’ve made various homemade paints using this interesting material. These three pieces use the home made paint in various ways. On #46 is applied many layers of the diluted paint, with a polishing process in between. The plaster surface sucks up the paint well, forming a shinny layer at the end. I like how the paint reveals the density variations as marblized patterns. #45 has the same process, but with a surface patterned with various size small holes. The white part is painted with enamel. The surface has my tar encaustic paint as well as black paint. #47 is stained with thinner paint, again circular patterns reveal the density variations in interesting ways. I was a little concerned with the longevity of the paint but they all seem to be very stable.
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New Additions to the Site, January 16, 2023
Here are three pieces recently added to my site in sculpture section under 1995-2005.
I wonder if I will ever see these pieces in person again. Seeing older pieces can be an odd experience. It’s like meeting an old friend but the friend hasn’t aged at all; I meet the presence just as I remember. It’s as if time and space don’t exist where they live.
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New additions to the site, January 8, 2023
I didn’t grow up surrounded by art. I was really into making plastic model kits, drawing comic book characters or just making things in general as a kid. But I didn’t really know visual art as a potent social institution. I had to be exposed to art in front of my eyes. I took an art class when I was attending community college. The teacher showed me his paintings and drawings, demonstrating that marks on paper can do what sounds can do with music. This was eyeopening for me. I was captivated by this phenomenon. So from the very beginning, my interest centered around capturing this mysterious quality that somehow moves me.
So it’s probably not a coincidence that I stuck with simpler forms without recognizable representations. I wanted to capture this mysterious thing, not to represent a concrete idea with symbols or narratives. I wanted to be struck directly with this something. The works I did around that time are heavily guided by this idea.
These two pieces show my typical ways of mark making at the time and later time as well. One is circular forms made by electric drills with spade bits. I like the contrast of precise circles and how they meet with the materials to express the physicality. Second is the use of homemade encaustic paint applied to express textures and tones of the surface. The paint is also used to express structural dynamics with lines, shapes, contrasts and so on.
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New additions to the site, December 14, 2022
I asked my wife what I should write to go with this post. She jokingly said that I should write about why I make such weird images. I don’t know the answer to be honest. But I think things are weird. We stay in our routines, we observe rules, ideas, myths and beliefs flooding out of big corporate entities to remain “good citizens” of “democratic countries”. But when we take one step outside and look in, we see people hurting each other for nothing, people following ridiculous rules and people being forced to play clowns in a circus only to keep up with the status quo. People pay prices to stay in these invisible cages. The cages distort the bodies, the faces, the minds and the souls. The rosy promises and slogans are conditional, propping up the hierarchy governed by money and violence. Weird to see things upside down. Weird to see people sleeping on streets when rich people have many houses. Weird to see more money spent on bombs than healthcare, housing, and food for the people. Needless to say these things aren’t just weird, they are brutal and upsetting. So there is that. But when I work, I try to empty my head to feel visual elements for what they are, and let them speak; surely weird things come out, but profoundly fascinating things happen among them too, just as in real life. Perhaps it is a practice to find potentials among elements when they can interact on their own accord. Maybe they are like how life can be. Anyway, I’m posting because I just added 6 recent paintings of mine to my site. They are under Painting. You can see multiple views and details for each piece.
Studio update:
I’ve been working on new sculptures. The next set of pieces will be sculptures.
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New addition to the site, Nov 22, 2022
6 of my recent sculptures have been added to my site. They are in the Sculpture section under 2020-current. You can see alternate views and details for each piece.
Despite the grim nature of the ongoing social restructuring for more disparity, more authoritarianism, more commodification, more financializing, and more propagandizing, I must say I was relatively prolific for the past two years. Perhaps I was forced to face my source of creativity and imagination more as the predicaments increased a sense alienation. I was perhaps yearning for a solid ground to stand on; to me, this is often my studio and my work. On the other hand, I have also met new friends as my social network shifted, and I also renewed my appreciation for people who have been helping me all these years. I am looking forward to facing what life brings to me.
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New Print, B18-01
Here is my tenth Piezography print. For those who are not familiar with Piezography, it is a black and white photography printing method. It utilizes color inkjet printers, but the method uses black inks in the color heads, expressing varying degrees of grays instead of grays expressed with black dots. You load a special software to your computer which controls appropriate actions of the heads to produce black and white prints. It sounds complicated, but once your equipment is set up, it continues to work reliably. In fact, to me, one of the best things about it is its solidness in producing consistent results. It allows me to concentrate on the making part instead of getting bogged down with the technical part. A photographer friend of mine, Brian Miller, told me about it years ago, praising its exceptional print quality.
I start from a scanned drawing. Then I work on the image on the screen. After a meticulous and long editing process, back and forth from screen to paper, and vice verse, I arrive at a finished print. So the prints are not reproductions; there are multiples but each of them is an original.
For those interested in the prints, please take a look at the print section of the site. The new one will be added shortly.
B18-01, Piezography on archival cotton paper, variable sizes, 2019-22
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New additions to the site, Nov 3, 2022
6 pieces have been added to the site in the sculpture section under 1995-2005.
I moved to eastern Long Island in 1999 to be with my future wife. Those pieces were finished either in 2001 or 2002. Some were brought over not yet finished from a sweatshop building in Union City, NJ, where I lived and worked. I lived in my art studio where a tiny area for my bed was symbolically separated from the studio fumes and dusts with a plastic sheet. I was young and all I thought about was working in my studio.
Then I loaded my 1995 Toyota T100 pickup with all I had and moved to where I am now.
I was always in search of a studio space when I arrived in Long Island. I tried working in a small shed at the house where we lived and still live. I purchased a horse trailer with a for sale sign to be converted into a studio. I rented a friend’s basement as a studio. Nothing really worked too well, but the works somehow found their way out. One of the reasons why I worked primarily on wall pieces at the time was the space constraint, although I had my beginning as a painter and I do have affinity toward wall pieces.
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everything is free now
In Art, Artist, Capitalism, colonialism, Culture, digitalization, empire, Exhibition, financialization, imperialism, News, outdoor art, Painting, public art, street art onI had a great time strolling around Brooklyn with Josh and David from everythingisfreenow.org a few days ago. It’s been awhile since everythingisfreenow.org left social media platforms. But of course that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They’ve quietly placed hundreds of paintings on the streets of Brooklyn so far. If you know where to look, you see that their work has become a part of the cityscape. Their work has turned the public space into a place to appreciate and discuss art and life.
The language of art manifests as the language of life. No matter how hard the ruling class tries to digitize everything, financialize everything, commodify everything, colonize everything to mold everything into the imperial framework, life finds ways to build its social fabric on its own terms.
New York has gone through so much: Wave after wave of neoliberal restructuring have been inflicted in the name of fighting crimes, terrorisms, and the virus. The same people who define “crises” have been the ones who benefit from “the solutions”. The social hierarchy is maintained and continues to function as a machine of structural extortion. But life still persists as art on streets, community gardens, cooperative housing projects and etc. Seeing them up close and hearing about them from Josh and David warmed my heart.
Here are some photos from their website:
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Gana Art Bogwang Show 2022
I am not religious at all in a traditional sense. But being in my studio struggling to make work has taught me that there are incomprehensible mechanisms operating beyond our perceptions. The glimpses of the vastness show up as “uncanny coincidences”, “unexplainable perceptions”, “overwhelming emotions of unknown origins” and so on.
So when I felt an unexplainable familiarity in being in Korea, an overwhelming sense of nostalgia and extreme sadness in leaving the country, I was not too puzzled, but still the sensation was new and palpable. All I can say is that things connect in some unknown ways and I humbly feel it as it is.
This is one of the bigger shows I have had, with 17 art works in a large venue with 2 floors.
The pieces were selected by Jung Lee the director of Gana Art and his curators. The set certainly has a cohesive theme of some sort, but I couldn’t pin point it initially. The director basically said that he thought about the taste of the Korean audience. The pieces filled up the venue like they were made for it. They certainly made selections which are cogent and very effective as a whole.
Having been in Korea looking at its art, new and old, working with people there and breathing the air in Seoul, I came to speculate on an intuitive level that the theme has something to do with some sort of faceless force of nature which grips hearts of the people in the region. And grips hearts of people in surrounding regions just as the Japanese centuries ago were so passionately fascinated by their ceramics in a narrowly defined context of “wabi sabi” sensibility. In reality, though, what I am trying to describe exists in more fundamental and ubiquitous ways, which can manifest in countless ways. It’s the resigned harmony with the unknown vastness, which I also feel as a basis of my studio practice. To me, being in studio is to be a listener, a keen observer, a channeler, who reflects dynamics surrounding us as patterns which resonate with us with visceral significance.
And this somehow relates back to my feeling about being in Seoul—my familiarity and affinity toward it. I am deeply drawn to the land, food and its people without knowing exactly how or why. My attempt in articulating it seems to remain circular as words go around the essence.
In any case, I thank the wonderful people I met there and I look forward to our future collaborations.
Here are some images from the show. Some detail images have been added, which were photographed previously in my studio.
