Family Pictures

About the Work

From the Artist

In Family Pictures, each portrait is shifted slightly within a frame, to suggest that the process of recall may not be fixed. Author bell hooks has described this process of remembering as an "encounter; sometimes told from the first person, sometimes told by the third." Assembled as pages in a fictional album, these Family Pictures form a cycle of reunion and a joining of fragments made whole by a narrative layered with multiple views of the past.

I have used portraiture as a way to use personal histories to illuminate larger visions and world events. As an Asian American artist, portraiture has allowed me to respond to the stereotypes of Asians as a monolithic yellow race with images constructed from my own lived experience. I have tried to portray my subjects as possessing a rich interior life and a presence that asks the viewer to reflect carefully on the ways we see and are being seen. 

Unlike many younger artists who developed their love of printmaking as students in university printmaking departments, I learned how to etch and silkscreen from working alongside other artists in shops like Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop and the Lower East Side Printshop in the 1970s—unconventional workspaces and printmaking centers for artists experimenting with the printed image.

Brandywine Workshop provided the added experience of a residency embedded in South Philadelphia, which gave artists the time and space to engage in creative collaborations with their professional offset printers. 

Because of my rich history with these shops, printmaking has always been tied closely to the notion of an artist community supported and energized by the existence of these important nonprofit work spaces. At a time when printmaking, as a genre, has been displaced by digital technology, I am grateful to Brandywine Workshop for keeping printmaking alive, and for continuing to give printmakers one of the finest opportunities to share their work and their collective vision for a more diverse and equitable art world.
_{—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records}

In my paintings, I am interested in evoking a sense of mood, often connected with specific events and places, and especially those suggestive of dream and of memory. If a meaning is, as such, to be extracted, it is not through a direct reference to the figures as symbols, but by an oblique understanding. The figures are neither metaphors beyond themselves nor are they purely what they depict; the aim is to hold the mind in suspension over a field of possibilities rather than arrest it in a concept.

The language employed in my early pictures is largely derived from Mughal painting, with an interest in narrative and in flat pictorial space. Direct exposure to European painting, and especially to certain forms of Romanticism and Expressionism (the works of painters like Munch, Goya, and Blake), stimulated and enriched my pictorial language and I now experiment with looser structures, freer handling, and deep pictorial space.

I am aware that my work is informed by my exposure to and interaction with the Indian and European traditions of art. However, despite my training and familiarity with the two traditions, my work is less concerned with the polemic of the relationship of the one tradition to the other, although there is apparent in my work an engagement with the contractions between the two and an attempt to utilize aspects of the language and the thought of each. I wish to assimilate the two, but in my own individual way, in a manner in which these two strains can express and celebrate themselves as they unite and separate only to meet once again to form a distinct identity. To quote William Blake, "I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's."
_{—Adapted and excerpted from http://artasiamerica.org/artist/detail/66, accessed 2-25-2021}