" My work can be paralleled to Japanese contemporary writer Haruki Murakami's mysterious and magic realistic novels. In Murakami's stories, isolated protagonists navigate through a Pynchon-like labyrinth of seemingly unconnected events. There is a simliarity between his writing and my own desire to capture capturing a world where one's consciousness and dreams become slowly intertwined. It is this feeling of being at once unsettled and calmed, chaotic and isolated at the same time which is the source of my impulse to paint. Inevitably, central in my mind is the idea of loss and identity - who are we when we are stripped of everything? While creating this work, I have worked as a cultural activist in a number of projects relating to diversity, multiculturalism and Chinese Canadian identity in the viusal arts. Against this backdrop, some questions emerge that reflect a disaporic worldview: How does our sense of self stand up to increased diversity? How does one integrate into one's enironment and to what degree does this change us?

There is an encroachment of the environment upon a symbolized sense of self and the compression of a time in the work. Unboind from any loyalty to a photographic source or drawing, through their centralized composition and forceful abstraction and intense coloration, the images take on their own character. As though bearing against the ground for some sort of stability, the central characters/structures in my paintings seem to strie for quietude amongst the ruckus and noise of a chaotic world full of unendging choice and uncertainty. Where Murakami's protagonists must deal iwht the darker, insidious affects of violence such as the effects of the Japanese-Russian war, the central figure or anthropomorphicbuilding or structure which inhabit my paintings -- a man poised with an umbrella, a building wedged into the ground or an army vehicle -- seem to be more preoccupied with an inner turmoil, resigned to an impartial and increasingly diverse world.."