Artist Statement
My sense of empathy towards other living beings can be traced from the death of my mother and growing up with a close familiarity to loneliness. Visiting the cemetery one Mother’s Day, as my father wiped away the dust that had settled in my mother’s etched portrait, I observed the polished granite stone embedded in the grass becoming a perfect reflection of the sky. In the painting Mother (2017-2018), the reflection is transformed as a matte surface wherein I thought about a literal hole in the ground — either a practical hole dug to house or nurture a living animal, or a ceremonial hole dug to encompass a dead human body. At the same time, I also attempted to render a void in the painting by contemplating the space left from the absence of a person, picturing the intangible lack of their presence long after their body has decayed.