Artist's Statement

My artwork is my way of understanding the world. I think best with my eyes. Remembered images, spatial relationships, colors, postures, gestures – these are what clarify an event or idea for me, these are what allow me to do my clearest and deepest thinking.

As a young man making sculpture in traditional media I became frustrated in my attempts to sculpt the spaces between objects. Then in the late 1970's I encountered three-dimensional computer graphics, which allowed me to do just this. Though the technology was extremely primitive by our current standards, I was able to make very powerful compositions. Since then, I have continued to use digital technology for all my artwork, most frequently combining it with non-digital art-making techniques, always using it to pursue the ideas that drive me.

The issues I have dealt with in my art have both evolved and stayed the same over the past thirty years. One issue has been that of perception and knowledge. How do we perceive the world and make sense of what we experience? How do we perceive and what is the difference between object and space? Between movement and stillness? Between us and not-us?

At different stages of my life, other issues have come to the fore – the drive within us to connect with another human being; the joys of our sexuality; the pain of loneliness; youth and aging; the injuries, both physical and emotional, that we accumulate.

As I have gotten older I have become especially interested in how all these different feelings and thoughts co-exist within us simultaneously. We accumulate experiences and emotions over time, we sort them out as best we can, and we end up living with an internal mix of disparate, incomplete, often conflicting, feelings and experiences. We work and we play, we socialize and we seek time by ourselves, we have our physical pleasures, and our spiritual longings. All we internalize over time, and we somehow live with this infinite variety of feelings and experiences simultaneously.

The imagery, animation, sculpture, and murals I have created are my efforts to understand these issues by giving them visual form.  This is my artwork.  If I have done my work well, others will respond to it.

  Chinese translation of Statement