'Here lies whose name was writ in water." John Keats

In this body of painting, mixed media drawings and installations, I am inspired by the written communication on Facebook, a virtual social networking website, also known as one of the symbols of popular culture today. I chose to focus on the text to examine the ways to make this ephemeral, fleeting written data lasting and perhaps permanent by means of re-channeling and re-presenting them in a visual format. I was also interested in exploring how these realities typed in virtual space would survive by means of my handwriting when adapted to the pictorial space, and where this process would lead me. Hence, I gathered texts from my home page on Facebook and wrote them over and over again with a gestural manner in fast pace so that they would start to lose their identity and original purpose to form a motif of lines and contours. This way, I used the text as a visual image. Through this process, some text faded away, while some still remained legible. To form the composition, I extracted and marked shapes out of these text-based patterns and combined them together with color, various paint and drawing materials (e.g., pen, acrylic, spray paint, ink, graphite, colored pencil and pastel), sewing applications (e.g., machine stitching and threading), painted photographs and indefinite, organic cut-outs. Through these series of works, I am recycling these publicly exposed virtual conversations, information and momentum by presenting them in a new context, perhaps in a new abstracted narrative. Here, I am revealing a whole new narrative by veiling it with my gestural handwriting. In each work, there is a hidden story and a notion of a place that is dissolved into abstraction. These all exist in an obscure visual presence. I aim for the viewers to seek clues that are related to both the natural and the constructed world. Such encountered tendencies will evoke a lyrical, vibrant, fragile and ambiguous place that rests somewhere in between representation and abstraction.