I’m having an open studio for the first time ever, and would love to see you! I’ll be previewing not one but two (!!) new bodies of work-in-progress that I’ve been hammering away on (literally) during the past 5 weeks here at the Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency, right outside the west gate of Joshua Tree National Park. Make a day trip or weekend of it in the desert–go for a picnic and hike or brunch at La Copine or grab some coffee and stroll around Joshua Tree… Then come by the JTHAR studio from 4–6pm for some art and a reading from essayist Miles Griffis, my current fellow artist resident! Hope to see you here!

:: New works ::

sitting still/standing still is a daily still life meditation on the push-pull between artifice and nature. Set against the backdrop of the Mojave, the multimedia series follows the lives of two inanimate main characters—white gallery podia—as they experience the oft-surprising biodiversity of the desert and the undeniable human presence therein.

Nature Torte is the inevitable unification of the shared stories of two things that could not seem more different: the natural world… and cake. The two are both representatives of impermanences, though the timescales of their lives are drastically different. They both have extremely fragile natures that require balance, while being surprisingly sturdy in spite of their delicacy. And both are often viewed as objects of consumption—and thus, desire—in current media: the physical consumption of dessert and the touristic, environmental consumption of the desert.

You know that I can never resist a good drip!

With the markets bursting with flowers and fruits right now, I’m sharing some new beauty work for the season, with prop stylist Kimberly Swedelius. With these images, we went for a looser, natural, laissez faire feel, with drips and imperfections left on the foraged fruits, and typically-invisible T-pins and floral frog structures showing through in the still lifes. And I opted for a gentler light than is common in a lot of product photography these days to really emphasize the soft beauty—and drama!—of the cosmetics.

Two of my pieces from the Asian American Still Life series have been invited to the Potluck group show at Hashimoto Contemporary LA–a show celebrating all things food art, curated by Dasha Matsuura. The show opens on February 12 and runs through March 5. I’ll be at the opening in the evening on the 12th, so please come by and say hello!

The two pieces in the show are near and dear to my heart–“Brueghel’s Breakfast” (pictured above) and “Onggi with Six Kimchi” (below). I’m so thrilled that Dasha picked these two as a set, because both of them feature food staples that play a huge role in the cultural fabric of LA: donuts and kimchi! For the show, I wanted to do something appropriately loud to go with all of the other wonderful food art painting and sculpture that will be in the show, so I opted to go really wild on the framing. I sourced two ornate frames from around LA, and over the course of a month, stripped them down and refinished them by hand in a lilac-y violet and gold leafing. I love the levity that they bring to the serious tone still lifes often have, and the cheeky irreverence the color brings to these very traditional gilded frames.

Swing by on February 12th (1-8pm) or anytime throughout the month to see them and the rest of the show in person!

“Brueghel’s Breakfast” and “Onggi with Six Kimchi” will be available framed and unframed. For more info, please contact the gallery, LA@hashimotocontemporary.com.

I’m super thrilled to share that select pieces from my on-going project, Asian American Still Life, were featured in an interview with photo editor Pia Peterson on Buzzfeed News this week. For a hot second on the morning of publication, my still life work was sandwiched above the fold between Ben Affleck, the Kardashians, and daily covid numbers–a definite highlight of my time with this project so far!

Read the whole thing here!

As 2022 gets cracking (sorry, couldn’t resist), I’m sharing this conceptual mini story that I put together with food stylist Veronica Laramie, celebrating the might egg.

Usually egg-focused content for the upcoming springtime months tends to be chock full of pastels, but I instead took a page of inspiration from photography history. I love all of Paul Outerbridge’s geometric egg studies throughout his photographic lifetime, and they were very influential in the history of still life photography in the 1900s, so I wanted to do a nod and contemporary update to Outerbridge’s eggs, adding a motion component and bringing some of the iconic yellowness of eggs to the black and white world.

For lighting schemes I brought in a spotlight mount to get really crisp black and white shadows, a la many of the original Outerbridge works. The shadows and lighting in a sense were another “prop” in the images, helping to create a space age, graphic world. For the various images, I wanted to play on classic “egg” tales: Humpty Dumpty falling down a wall, Salvador Dali-style eggs dripping over architectural shapes, and a breakfast time tableau with milk and egg-in-a-hole toast.