Closer To What It Means To Be Human

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

I spent two years in Taipei losing touch with the Texas farmland and country woods of my childhood, then this year I went back to visit. 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.

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 is a language that transcends culture. I spent countless hours on wooden pasture fences, wooded hilltops, and expanses of rolling lawns, reclaiming home as my senses knew it.

The subject here has found one unmoving element - Mother Nature - and she embraces it both 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.

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