On Water and Painting

Water has always been where I begin. Not as subject matter, but as a way of thinking about how paint should move — familiar, fluid, never forced.

When I am working, I am not trying to control what happens on the canvas. I am trying to get out of the way long enough for something true to appear. That is harder than it sounds. The instinct is always to impose, to correct, to make it look like what you intended. But the paintings I am most proud of are the ones where I stopped deciding and started listening.

I have been thinking about why water feels like the right metaphor. I think it is because water is patient. It takes the shape of what contains it, but it does not become that shape permanently. Given time, it moves on. Given enough pressure, it carves stone.

I grew up in China. I studied in Ohio and New York. I have lived in several containers. What I carry between them is not an image of home but a feeling — the specific quiet of a surface that looks still but is always, underneath, in motion.

That is what I want the paintings to do. To look quiet from across the room, and to open up the longer you stand in front of them.

If you are reading this and thinking about a work — I mean that. Come closer.