Artist Statement
For the past year I have been painting, over and over again, objects from my grandpa’s Beijing apartment—a wide-mouthed vase of fake flowers, a countertop trash can, old stuffed animals in plastic wrap. In him I find a mythos of age, of a culture and time with an entirely different relationship to wealth and ownership. The often-repetitive exercise is at once a freedom from and indulgence in my anxiety around constantly wanting to have. My work maintains a representational distance from the objects and spaces it interrogates. Painterly marks relitigate the power and qualities of fetish objects, and the index of this gesture ends up at once tantalizing and empty, not unlike the thing itself. Looking at the thing, photographing it, drawing it, painting it, the “it” starts to slip away—while further and further removed from the physical likeness of a thing, am I getting any closer?
