Project Statement

This series of paintings moves through the quiet terrain where upbringing presses against the formation of identity. Objects carried through childhood—tools, fragments of clothing, small functional things—linger long after their immediate purpose fades. With time, their presence shifts. What once felt incidental begins to hold a different gravity, shaped by memory, distance, and reconsideration.

Each painting circles around an object: a kite, a belt, a clothing tag, a kite reel. These forms remain familiar but slightly unsettled, opening space for associations to accumulate. Guidance, inheritance, restraint, and adaptation hover around them without settling into fixed meaning.

Deprived of Silk and Bamboo

A kite drifts into view, recalling the quiet intimacy of learning to guide something fragile through open air. The image leans toward a moment often linked to care and instruction, yet the tension between lift and tether lingers. The space around the object invites reflection on the uneven conditions through which direction and independence gradually take shape.

Two In One

A belt appears worn in a way that resists its intended orientation. The shift loosens its practical certainty and draws attention to the object’s presence around the body. Authority, protection, and unease gather at its edges, allowing the object to oscillate between comfort and constraint.

Fruit of the Womb

An enlarged clothing tag occupies the center of the composition, bringing an overlooked detail forward. Normally hidden against the skin, the tag becomes newly visible—its material and scale quietly exaggerated. The work gestures toward the subtle ways expectations and inherited identities press close to the body, sometimes concealed, sometimes felt.

Medium Strength Adhesive

A kite reel rests against the wall, held in place with blue tape. The arrangement suggests both care and provisional attachment. Control, release, and return circulate through the object’s presence, hinting at the frameworks that shape movement while leaving their permanence uncertain.

Across the series, a warm yellow palette drawn from the paintings of Rembrandt echoes a classical visual language once strongly valued within my upbringing. Through this familiar chromatic atmosphere, personal imagery enters into dialogue with inherited tradition, allowing those influences to be revisited, shifted, and reconsidered through a different lens.