What is it that you create?

I paint. But I also have strong feelings towards good use of words and sentence structures, I like to write, read and give.

How did your making start?

Quite frankly I’m not really sure where it all started. I will have to rely on my grandparents and parents’ memory of me as a little girl, who was really obsessed with touching the soles of shoes and smelling the wax of crayons. They always claim that I was creative, always drawing... But I can’t help but think that it was an outlet for being incredibly bad at other activities like sports and having friends. I do remember vividly the time my grandfather gifted me an easel when I was 6. I guess that does mean that I was creative before that. I have an image of him kneel- ing down and me not believing what I had in front of me. From there I started taking drawing lessons and somehow was exposed to having my hands understand materials and things like that. The small, white table in my childhood room was covered in paint and drawings, and I don’t have a memory of my mother being upset at that mess. I remember also making a comic book around the same age, it was called The Adventures of Mandy and Cross —a comic book story of two austriches that fall in love and are bad at jokes and math—which I still have in my bookshelf and surprises me every time I look at it. I don’t know if this answers a pinpoint of how or where my interest in art started, but I guess this explains some things. More education-training related, before starting my college education I did an intensive on Russian Literature at Brown University, which I have fond memories of, so I had planned to study Pre-Law and writing for my undergraduate. I made an impulsive choice to change it last minute to Architecture. Then I found myself making sculptures and not designs/renderings of buildings, which led to my honest transfer to Fine Arts.

Who has shaped you as an artist?

My grandfather always told me I could do anything I wanted in life, and that what- ever I did I had to be as good as gold. I think that blind trust has shaped the way in which I confront my thoughts and desires. He’s no longer alive to see my paintings and what I’m reading or writing, but I always think of him when I paint, and I try to honor him in my discipline and devotion.

In your initial search for your medium, what were some things you explored before you found painting, or are you still searching?

I particularly like to talk about mediums in terms of structuring because when I’m working, my instinct is to try and build and to fill —to fill something until it feels right. I truly enjoy drawing. I did some sculpture for a bit too. But I am the freest when working with paint. I stand firm with the belief that the language of painting is a never-ending search. The deconstruction of ideas and methods are not finite, and don’t mean exhaustion. It simply means examining it critically. That’s what makes painting such a funny thing. Gerhard Richter once said that you have to be obsessed for you to be a real painter, because it is pure idiocy. And I fully laugh at that statement because it is true, a true obsession doesn’t end, it’s a loop.

How do your parents feel about you chasing this dream?

My parents fully support my practice. They are both interested in art, especially my mother. They don’t necessarily understand what I’m painting or what I’m reading or what I’m thinking, and I think that’s a good thing. Not understanding is good for paintings. I think that surfaces that one doesn’t understand, are the ones being looked and thought at the most.

A lot of your work considers spaces, how do you define space?

I read and contemplate on what space means to me. I’m interested in longing and unreal spaces that are stored in memories. The house that I lost forever continues to live on in me. This house insists to me to live again, these memories of home expect a supplement of living. I consider the past, and I reflect on not having lived profoundly enough in the old house that filled my heart. It comes from the past and it overwhelms me. Rilke expresses this regret in a beautiful way:

“Oh longing for places that were not cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make a good from far The forgotten gesture, the additional act?”

I know a place, or at the very least I know part of it. The distance and closing of walls, I feel getting winded and I walk down the stairs. I go to a zone of not re- membering and present the consciousness with the moment, with something of the past. I confuse past and present as both are conflated in my imagery. It feels very disorienting, I don’t know where I’m standing or how I feel in this place. Space for me is about the past, about memory, about losing. About leaving some- thing behind. About not having photos of things, about mental storage. Space in my paintings attempt to recover that zone and place. The site of memory is a strange place to be, and the idea of displacement and home as subject interest me. The thought of dislocation, fracture, displacement. Immigration and how relevant it is now to our history. To think of a piece as poetic and political. To float within those two. To break a restriction, and to let freedom provide a way of drawing. Space in my paintings are prompted by specific memories but not driven by it.

What does painting do that no other format can?

I think I have come not to a certain wisdom but perhaps to a certain sense. I question myself, what does being a painter mean to me? And I always come to simply being true to my imagination. When I paint something, I think of it not
as being factually true (mere fact as a web of circumstances and accidents), but as being true to something deeper. When I treat a surface, I treat it because somehow I believe in it—not as one believes in mere history, but rather as one believes in a dream or an ideal. I think that’s something that painting does for me that no other format can.

How much is a painting pre-determined before you put the brush to canvas?

I merely try to convey what the dream is. And if the dream is a dim one (in my case, it usually is), I do not try to beautify it, or even to understand it, I just trust that moment.