One and Many (2017–18)


Artist statement

From a studio visit on a Saturday afternoon, my artist friend expressed to me that one of her biggest struggles in painting has to do with 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, a painting has no such definite stage as to when it is complete. That made me contemplate 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 probably because the painter 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 the 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 painting made by my artist friend.