The paintings present views of a place that is intimate and familiar, yet strange. It is airless, with sound tamped down. Shapes lock together, tectonically tense, creating a sense of anxiety, only to slip past one another like playing cards. I want the scenes to feel full of potential energy, as if the space is prickly with static, charged with the anticipation of an encounter, or blushing in its aftermath. The paintings are descriptions of weird and quotidian experiences, things caught in the corner of my eye, and an attempt to conjure slippery memories. I hope the work is uneasy and suspenseful like the excitement of exploring a new place, and the thrill of knowing you are drifting back into a frightening dream.

I am interested in unusual light and color worlds, gradients (which create movement) contrasted against sharp static edges, but most of all, building layered and compartmentalized spaces in paint. Windows, cut-outs and portals of different kinds frequently reoccur and compete in the work.

Framing devices, like a border of foliage or open car door, provide context and contrast for an embedded vignette to exist within the larger painting. I intend for viewers to imaginatively move through the spaces finding zones that both enclose and offer escape from the structured but often claustrophobic scenes.

Only in the past few years has the motivation for these compositional tendencies started to make sense to me as I begin to understand the spaces as metaphorical constructions of a complicated personal identity - Korean born adoptee in a white American family. This liminal state, at times disorienting and fragmented, also often provides opportunities for discovery and surprise.

The scenes are specific, from direct personal experience, but are open and still enough to invite imaginary meanderings and personal introspection. Numerous painted layers and pockets of space are described with color gradients bound by sharp taped edges. The process of laying down tape, carving into it with an x-acto blade, removing the incised shape and painting into that void is labor intensive activity that is both delicate and violent. Soft watercolor paper, the most appropriate substrate for gouache, is assaulted by numerous cuts. Tiny shapes are painted and repainted many times creating a complex surface that appears flat, but consists of numerous raised plateaus reminiscent of tiered agriculture (ex. rice paddies). Gradients which change color and/or value gradually and smoothly create movement, while the raised edges created by masking are persistently static and create a hard stop. The movement combined with sharpness builds tension, clarity and a degree of discomfort.

The work, which is entirely hand painted, is often confused with digital images. This is due to the sharp edges and specific color worlds. I welcome this misidentification of medium as it mirrors my own slippery identity and existence caught between two worlds, pigment and pixel.

In my estimation the spaces that I choose to paint expand well beyond their concrete dimensions through the process of memory, daydream and distraction. Folded into their plain reality are past experiences both significant and trivial, mental rehearsals for future incidents, clutter and caches. The work aims to illuminate this uncanny phenomenon of minutia unfolding into entire worlds.