My trans-continental cultural life, the conflicts it creates and the insights it offers, is the foundation of my art. My “inner city” adolescence with Afro-Latinos immigrants in New York City, my education and training in affluent White private institutions in New England and emerging as an artist in Beijing with my Chinese colleagues are three very distinct spaces racially, culturally, economically or linguistically speaking. Further, with more than a decade of relative isolation in each of these spaces, I have nurtured a shifting social identity that thrives in a tri-cultural delta. In short, mediating constantly shifting racial, socio-economic and cultural atmospheres is my modus vivendi. This has increased my awareness of similarities and differences within a culture and between cultures. Moreover, it has heightened my sensitivity to how we are indoctrinated into our communities also known as socialization.

We are socialized in many ways, but language is the most common medium for human socialization. Language that we hear and engage with influences how we see the world. We are engulfed in and realized in language. In order to investigate this subject, I had to reduce the human figure. In so, I arrived to mouthed-peaches, which I consider to be my single-celled humans. This was my point of departure for this body of work, which traverses multiple medium and dimensions.

Generally speaking, I am interested in the figure and figural synecdoche in narratives and metaphors. Frequently recurring themes in my work are cross-cultural misinterpretations, identity formation, movement across thresholds, anthropomorphism, landscape as metaphor, the surreal, the grotesque and humor. In the studio I often use laughter as a guide—serious conversations are easier with levity.

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