Closer To What It Means To Be Human

Integrating the contrasting cultures of my mother and father (the urban Buddhist-Daoist sprawl of Taiwan and the Pentecostal farm existence of East Texas) brought me to Taipei after graduating from university.

After two years in Taipei, I went back to visit the Texas farmland and country woods of my childhood. I was there for the swift handover between winter and summer that Texas calls spring and also for the freak hailstorms, tornadoes, floods, and resulting power outages that wiped through the county that spring.

My social definition of home has always ebbed and flowed but revisiting the landscapes from my formative years showed me how some elements within it never change; nature transcends culture. I spent many hours on pasture fences and wooded hilltops, reclaiming home as my senses knew it.

The subject here has found one unmoving element - Mother Nature - and embraces it in relief and desperation. Nature returns the embrace with vine, wave, raincloud, and tide. Inside this embrace, balance is restored, signified with Texas scenery stylized by Chinese techniques, and by the negative spaces of the background forming yin and yang.