Propositions 500+

written 2025

My work begins from a simple yet enduring question: how do we live meaningfully in a world shaped by change, contingency, and limits? Each painting is built from countless gestures—decisions made in real time and accumulated over days, months, and sometimes years. My father used to say that actions speak louder than words, and that idea has become both an ethic and an inquiry for my life and my art practice. Actions shape character; character shapes how a life is lived. Accepting that reciprocal relationship is a form of accountability, a commitment to growth, and an acknowledgment that meaning must be made and remade over time.

These paintings are not proclamations but records of showing up—layer after layer, mark after mark—evidence of a decision to participate in the world rather than merely comment on it. Formally, the works translate this ongoing activity into surfaces that often appear momentarily suspended, as if time has briefly halted and offered a glimpse of something both immediate and timeless. I am interested in that hinge where restless making yields an experience of stillness, and where stillness, in turn, reveals the labor that produced it. The tension between accumulated work and perceptual calm parallels how we live: we act and adapt within circumstances we do not fully control, yet meaning emerges from the continuity of that engagement rather than from any single gesture or pronouncement.

I understand the paintings as a dialogue between action and stillness, between duration and the instant. The layers accrue like lived moments—acknowledging volatility, loss, and limitation—yet they also propose a form of persistence: the willingness to keep attending, to remain present, even as conditions shift. In a culture defined by acceleration and distraction, the work creates conditions in which viewers may slow down and register the quiet accumulation of choices that shape a surface and, by extension, a life. In doing so, the paintings foreground labor, duration, accountability, and interiority—qualities often eclipsed in contemporary experience but that remain crucial to any meaningful engagement with the world.

Materially, the work incorporates separated carbon nanotubes whose specific chiralities fluoresce in the short‑wave infrared spectrum (SWIR). Under certain optical conditions, the paintings emit light beyond the range of human vision. This expanded field of perception is not a mere technical flourish but a conceptual analogue to the themes that organize the work: the coexistence of what is visible and what is not, of what can be apprehended directly and what must be inferred. Just as accumulated actions shape a life in ways not always immediately legible, the nanotube fluorescence allows the paintings to operate simultaneously within and beyond ordinary sight, linking scientific precision to questions of perception, presence, and the unseen structures that frame experience.

Historically, the work extends conversations within practices that use repetition, accumulation, and material sensitivity to rethink perception—from minimal and post‑minimal strategies to aspects of Light and Space, Mono‑ha, and Korean minimalism. What unites these lineages for me is not style but a conviction that meaning arises through encounter: through the meeting of action and restraint, matter and attention, viewer and work in time. Rooted in these histories yet oriented toward the present, the paintings bring material innovation—including advances in optical and scientific research—into dialogue with a philosophical inquiry into what it means to inhabit an unstable moment.

Ultimately, the work affirms that complexity, uncertainty, accountability, and beauty are not contradictions but fundamental conditions of being alive. The paintings create a space where accumulated action, perceptual stillness, character, and expanded vision coexist, ushering viewers into an experience shaped by presence, persistence, and the possibility of seeing—and being seen—otherwise.