In Light we dwell

11 Sep - 2 Oct 2025

Art Atrium 48

Artist Statement

We live in an age of images. Never before have artists been so immersed in this endless sea of vision. When I first turned to the traditions of shanshui hua, Chinese landscape painting, I felt a quiet blessing: at my fingertips, almost any image could be summoned, every peak and stream within reach. Yet the deeper I immersed myself in these mountains and waterfalls, rocks, foliage, small houses and wandering figures, the more reverence I felt for the ancient masters. Their paintings were born only of what they had seen in real life and what they held in their hearts - simple, unembellished, yet inexhaustibly profound. It was then I understood: limitation and simplicity may be the deepest source of creativity, a truth easily obscured today, when we live not in scarcity but in overabundance of information.

The origins of this body of work trace back to 2021, when geometric shapes first appeared in my landscapes and began to converse with the natural forms. I cannot fully explain why it began. Only that among the countless images of Chinese painting I studied, it was always the recluses’ little houses, tucked deep in mountain valleys, that lingered with me the longest. Within those modest dwellings, the screen dividing the entrance and the inner space often captured my imagination, and many of my geometric forms have grown from this.

These little houses seemed less like structures than sanctuaries of the heart, offering a place free from disorder and quietly radiating peace and comfort. For me, the dwelling and the mountain that shelters it became a metaphor: a reminder that just as the recluse found harmony in the surroundings, we too can find connection with our own internal landscapes.

In this body of work, I continue to drift between worlds - the imagined and the observed, the abstract and the real. Here, memory and improvisation are my compass, shaping colour, composition, and the distilled simplicity of form. Geometry anchors skies and water, casting shadows of the manmade into landscapes that breathe with mountain, mist, and memory.

These paintings are rooted in contrast, but born from harmony.

I do not live among mountains as the old masters did, nor am I a painter of the open air. My encounters with nature are more transient: the sunrise and sunset glimpsed on daily drives, the quiet illumination and shadow that arrive without warning and leave me changed. Perhaps what guides me always is light, a truest bridge to the natural world. It shapes these works as fragile balances between the rational and the organic, permanence and evanescence.

Influenced by colour field painting, my palette leans into the surreal: colours not found in maps, but in fleeting skies, when clouds stretch thin at dawn, or the sun slips behind hills at dusk. Perspective is scattered, like traditional Chinese scrolls, where vision meanders and time is unpinned. Multiple viewpoints fold into one another, creating a space both deep and still, layered yet seamless. The hard-edged shapes are softened by the translucency of their own colour planes, dissolving boundaries between presence and absence. These forms speak of reason, of plans and consistency, set gently against the ungraspable softness of nature.

In the end, these works reflect not only how we shape the world around us, but how it quietly echoes through us in return. I hope they offer viewers a space to pause and reflect, where landscape is no longer bound to territory, but becomes a way of seeing, sensing, and being.