I make altar offerings. The shapes of my pieces are Chinese characters pulled from the headlines of today’s Chinese news that are online and in print.

My pigment sets include:

- rice, teas, and ashes
- gunpowder, bones, rust, and ashes
- seashells, sand, and Taoist immortal elixirs
- cinnabar, gold, and ashes

These pigment sets are pressed into oil paint and wax that has been set on a wood putty plywood substrate. Then I cover the surface with poetry often times in a gestural manner.

Most of my earlier work was burned at a Chinese altar funerary to venerate my Chinese ancestors who came to California before me. This ritual helps me to cultivate a kinship from the unchosen condition of exile that my people endured.

My altar offerings serves to express my cultural need to sanctify Sacramento’s historic China Slough Chinatown that was allowed to be set on fire and buried by Sacramento’s civic leaders in 1855 to make way for the Railroad Yards. Today the Railroad Yards is the largest infill redevelopment project in America.

I see this experience as my intersection of the sacred and the artistic…

of devotion and expression, preserving a moment in a world of the temporal. Prayer and poetry precedes each piece.