Pastel on Canvas
60” x 120”
2024-2025
Documentation: Sam Lee
Vav Gallery, 2025
Body-Subject/Le Corps Propre
remember not only how much you were loved,
not only the beds you lay on,
but also those desires that glowed openly
in eyes that looked at you,
trembled for you in the voices
only some chance obstacle frustrated them.
Now that it’s all finally in the past,
it seems almost as if you gave yourself
to those desires too
how they glowed,
remember,
in eyes that looked at you,
remember,
body,
how they trembled for you in those voices.
Reference here: Cavafy, C. P. The Complete Poems of Cavafy. Translated by Rae Dalven. Introduction by W. H. Auden. London: The Hogarth Press, 1961, 82. Poem: “Body, Remember . . .”
( the self acclimated by nature )
Installation
Dimensions vary
2025
Mylar, Stones, Cord, Lightbulb, Acrylic, and Crayon
It can look calm from a distance, but that calm is always temporary.
There is something like a sea underneath it. Not a surface you can fully see, more like a force you feel through its effects. It moves in cycles that don’t ask for permission, pulling your thoughts and attention in and out like tides responding to something far away but always present.
They arrive like shifts in climate rather than decisions.
The self, in this sense, is not separate from these cycles. It behaves more like water under influence, responding, rising, withdrawing. Not fully controlled, not fully free, but always in relation to something larger and constant.
Installation
Dimensions Vary
2025
Sand, and Wood Plank
like a desert that’s been stripped of water for so long it forgets what fullness even means. And yet it’s strange, it doesn’t just feel empty, it feels overwhelmed by that emptiness, like you’re somehow drowning in drought itself.
When the tide rises, something in you tightens.
You become more contained, almost like you’re bracing for impact or trying to stay above it. There’s a kind of control in it, like you’re pulling away from everything outside of you just to manage the pressure.
Then when it recedes, that control loosens.
The space it leaves behind doesn’t feel peaceful, it feels exposing. You start to look for something to fill the gap. The same absence that felt manageable before now feels like it’s asking something from you.
And so you move in cycles, not really choosing between high tide or low tide, but being changed by both.
Installation
Dimensions Vary
2025
Collected cigarette butts, drawer organiser, incense