Wish You Were Here Photograph

As a young girl, growing up in DC, my sisters and I would frequent the Smithsonian museums where we would spend time relishing and lingering in front of noteworthy and inspiring works in the Freer and Sackler, National Gallery of Art and Portrait Gallery. I was exposed to famous works of art at a young age. Some resonating pieces include works by James McNeill Whistler’s "Peacock Room” and Nam June Paik’s “Electronic Superhighway”. For the first 17 years of my life, I experienced the world with only near sighted vision. I became accustomed to using the digital camera resourcefully, often as a magnifying glass to see. I took my camera everywhere with me and it quickly became my lifeline. It is my preference to see directly through the lens and I adopted this shooting method very early on. I like to use the camera as a tool to explore details and show segmented parts of a larger picture. I also like to view each photo I take as a singular work, however also as apart of larger collections, representing larger ideas. Some themes that I continuously discover and rediscover include the immortality of florals, motion at night, animals in flight, dreams, nostalgia and romance. I also like to experiment with the crossing of stylistic and compositional elements such as symmetry, pattern, light, shadow and contrast. I will constantly explore colors and textures, showing how they interact, where they intersect and how they complement one another. I am partial to a color palette that includes cool, blue hues, light purple and pink combinations, warm golden shades and also bold, neon tones against a dark black backgrounds. My father, an independent filmmaker has always used parts of our family home as a set or storage for props and equipment. And thankfully so, because cameras were always available, there was never a shortage of computers around the house, batteries and memory chips were always ready to go. My mother, on the other hand dedicated herself to documenting every moment of our childhood and because of her, our family has a large archive of photo albums and memories to last us a lifetime. These printed photographs were often sent overseas to connect with family I’d never met until I began spending many summers abroad to learn more about my Asian culture and heritage.