One and Many (2017–18)
Artist statement
During a studio visit, my artist friend expressed to me that one of her biggest struggles in painting has to do with the decision on completion, i.e. to decide at what stage a painting is complete. While a latent image is fixed onto film the moment an exposure is made, it’s probably true that a painting has no such definite stage as to when it is complete. As our conversation went on, I started to consider the idea of underpainting—the many stages of a painting that are covered underneath, and had no chance to make their ways onto the surface, as the artist didn’t consider any of them as complete.
In this series, I’m interested in revealing the many underpainting within a painting that would otherwise be invisible. In collaboration with my artist friend, I followed her painting process from start to finish, during which I photographed her canvas whenever I encountered a sense of completion within her work. Using those photographs as raw materials, I then reconstructed a series of images that are visually similar to, and yet conceptually different from the only painting made by my artist friend.