"The longest journey in life is from the head to the heart." -- Ellen Gabriel

I have waded through thousands of miles in the "spiritual nomadism" of my creative process. I have traveled through and alight on various constructed images; I have traversed that gap between reality and illusion; I have crisscrossed between memory and oblivion; my creative journey is a vehicle of stories without narrative. I am devoured in the private game of remaking the world of material imageries and reconstructing fragments of meaning. An individualistic freedom to absorb, receive, disassemble, and compile is the origin of imagination. This is the beginning of narrative.

The use of aluminum foil, a material that appears rigid and solid yet is of fragile and malleable texture, is a metaphor for social phenomena in the post-industrial world. The "industrial membrane" of aluminum is like a different sort of progenitor, constantly wrapping objects and creating new countenances. Aluminum attempts to provoke the familiar images of daily life, the impermanence and anxieties of survival, and the natural desires of life. Ready-made objects and hand-drawn images are juxtaposed to signal new interpretation. Untamed imageries are staggered to create an outline of an incomplete scene, its shapes flowing, pooling and titillating within the constructed field. It is at once open and closed, the contour of the carrier is connected to the meaning outside of the field.

Object-filled plastic pouches in bundles hanging, separated from, yet interwoven into the surrounding, like seed, drop of water, tear, pupa, a forged imagery intertwining the external real and internal illusory-a hideout for the daydreamer. The object and image in the pouches are simultaneously individual microcosm and collective memory. The unique structure of the pouches allows refractions, creating optical illusion of real objects. The pouches appear in multiple focuses with blurry contour, just like the state of consciousness as one drifts in and out of slumber. The speed towards life and towards death of becomes constant competition, waiting for the sweetness of life to appear only to fade away.

Such juxtaposition originates from a paradoxical logic, where both is and isn’t is simultaneously true, thus opening the visual field up to pure freedom of imagination and ambiguity of thought. Objects and events are obscured by the illusory microcosm of the co-existence of the real and unreal. Occasionally, everyone finds oneself pausing in a self-posited space of isolation. The journey of life is circuitous between the real world and spiritual ecstasy, after releasing one’s fixated gaze on the juxtaposed real and illusory, the outside is transformed into inner reflection. Or perhaps, the open narrative and dialogue can be taken as metaphor of the human condition as a misperception of illusion, subtly drifting into chaos after being in grasp.

Eighteen years passed since my last solo show at IT Park, the world had since changed faster, with more progress, more chaos. Paradox continues, so does dialogue, imagination is as needed as ever. I both am and am not, I am simultaneously inside and outside. As a poet describes: ‘because we live at where we are not’, or… perhaps.