Artist statement

My professional work ranges from site-specific projects to installations and public art.  I create an interactive space that is informed by the physical, natural, social, and historical aspects of the site through people and their spatial narrative.  In this process, I explore the sociological and psychological content of each site in a manner similar to an archeologist or a forensic researcher.  The immediate physical and social context of the site influences the form, content, and choice of materials and media in my work.  The materials and methodology involved in my projects are as diverse as the concepts embodied in them. I excavate numerous meanings—cultural, geopolitical, social or personal—that are hidden within the materials.  By revealing personal memories, histories, myths, and contradictory issues of human nature, I explore social and personal facets that galvanize public interaction.  Art can provide visual poetry in the environment as well as function as a catalyst to deconstruct and re-invent a new vision for society.  While I expand my search into history, I try to pay attention to human sentiment, lived experience of past and present, and memory of the place.  I seek an emotional relationship to the audience predicated on a vulnerability offered by my intervention, that in turn relies upon the participation and subjectivity of the viewer.

My works emphasize both natural elements, such as earth, air, water, and fire, and biological elements, such as heartbeat, and body movement.  Spatially and sculpturally, I exchange and transform these elements into other mediums such as light, sound, and interactive movement by the use of technology.  I am interested in phenomenology, both a philosophical design in contemporary architecture, and a scientific field of research, based on the experience of materials and their sensory properties of the space, natural phenomena, and human perception.  Using sounds of waves, speed of wind, songs of birds, and human heartbeat or body movement as vehicles for communication, I try to engage people in a perceptual experience by creating a specific environment.

 

In the field of public art, I create works based on the culture and physical qualities of their location. I see my identity as inevitably “hybrid” – part sculptor, journalist, architect, and urban designer.  I have three decades of experience in creating site-specific installations and public art in the United States, Europe and Japan, with a history of successful interdisciplinary collaborations with design professionals, and the community.  My work encompasses transit/transportation facilities, airports, universities, libraries, parks, bridges, infrastructure, and other civic buildings and plazas.  The interdisciplinary relationship between art, architecture, sustainability, and technology is the key to the way I approach each site, and dictates the choice of materials and media in my work.

 

My public art also emphasizes natural elements, such as water, wind, and natural phenomena within the architectural context.  Spatially and sculpturally, I exchange and transform these elements into other mediums such as light, sound, and interactive movement by the use of technology.  I have completed large-scale laminated glassworks, canopies, terrazzo floors, and walkways for multimodal stations, as well as worked on a master plan for the transit projects in Seattle, San Francisco, and Tokyo.  In 2013, I was a member of a master plan design team for the Metro Red line in Baltimore.  I identified neighborhood characteristics along the 14-mile transit corridor, as well as established system wide design concepts, themes and solutions for infrastructural and architectural elements.  My goal is to create works that attract people to the possibility where and as they live.  The development and realization of public art is a dialogue with a place and its time–land and substance, its past, its people, the future they create–made new, immediate, and somehow timeless.