I approach painting as a “third space”—hovering between cultural inheritance within the Asian diaspora and the technological forces reshaping contemporary perception. Informed by the Daoist concept of xuan (玄), which evokes mystery and ambiguity, my paintings bring the atmospheric sensibilities of Chinese shanshui (山水) landscape painting into dialogue with the spontaneity of abstract expressionism and the calculated logic of digital aesthetics. Oscillating between improvisation and control, they envision a world in which landscapes are eroded as quickly as our attention spans.

Drawing from celestial phenomena, geological formations, and marine morphologies, I use unconventional tools to layer, scrape, stain, and pour. Translucent washes and open passages draw upon the use of activated negative space, creating contemplative moments within otherwise saturated compositions. Meticulous hard-edged patterns referencing glitches interrupt and compress pictorial depth. Raw smears of impasto intersect with softly diffused forms and translucent grids, blurring the boundaries between the expressive qualities of the human hand and the precision of machine interfaces. These intersections extend into the making process itself. Using a private AI model trained exclusively on my own paintings, I generate source imagery that I subsequently fragment, erase, and reconfigure through digital collage and painting. These compositions are then printed onto canvas and substantially transformed through physical interventions, allowing the gestures of the hand to disrupt and reinterpret the computational image. Code-switching between these distinct pictorial languages echoes the fragmented rhythms of navigating cultural identities while sustaining a presence across physical and digital worlds.

Oscillating between emptiness and saturation, I explore the seductive possibilities of technological power, tempered by an unsettling awareness of our diminished agency. Rather than treating AI as a means of automating image production, I approach it as a medium for translation, where images derived from my own practice are continuously reinterpreted through cycles of digital manipulation and embodied mark-making. Each act of erasure, reconstruction, and material intervention challenges the apparent authority of the generated image, reclaiming space for uncertainty, intuition, and human agency. In this sense, the process of painting becomes a site where inherited traditions and contemporary modes of perception continually reshape one another.