"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This starting sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina binds my art together: The diversity of human unhappiness. On my canvas there may be all kinds of painful subjects, but in the end there must be compassion and empathy, hence resolve and satisfaction. 

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As Richard Tuttle stated, "You don’t have art unless you would die without it." This urgency is directly linked to art's capacity for psychological restoration - the reason why, in 2023, I left my tech career for art. Sometimes it’s about the capacity to heal yourself: if you can use art to heal yourself, others will heal, too. Art gives us hope; it reminds us we are not alone when we are suffering. Today, behind each heavy curtain of a social media page, there is a broken person, but we all say, I am fine; everyone carries so much behind the smile. This is what I aim to reveal — the radical vulnerability, the disquiet behind the quiet, the storm behind the tranquility, and the loneliness in the crowd. My works expose our inward turmoil, and in effect they often carry a veil of melancholy. Melancholy is the tragedy well-handled; I believe that giving some room to melancholy in life makes it more resilient.

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Working across oil portraiture, painting, and sculptural inquiry, I am devoted to traditional durational protocols: the extended sitting, the physical interaction between artist and model, and the psychological encounter that transpires over time. As a dancer, I view human anatomy as a vessel for motion and poetry. This understanding is mirrored by my practice in original English poetry, which I utilize to give a visceral, linguistic form to the same internal states. In alignment with the philosophy of choreographer Pina Bausch — who stated, "I am not so much interested in how people move, but what moves them" — my figures and words do not merely illustrate specific characters; instead, they translate universal ideas. By intensely interrogating the particular and personal, my work seeks to construct a collective mirror, transforming individual vulnerability into a shared space for contemplation and restoration.​