Artist Statements
Born as the
first child and only son to a middle class traditional Malaysian
Chinese family, I have become the center of attention to both my family
and my relatives. Sometimes the attention thrust upon to me has become
too much.Often I have found it overwhelming, and have often felt
extremely uncomfortable. My family has bestowed upon me the
expectations that I should become successful, ensuring not only that I
continue the good name of the family within the community, but also
carry on the families traditions and values. All these expectations
weigh heavily upon me as the eldest child and only son.
As a child, I was overwhelmed at a sense of belonging,and the desire to
examine my family and social history and its impact on my repeated
childhood experiences of loss, longing, submission and silence. This
process of self-examination and self-revelation was made even more
difficult by the continuing pervasive cultural attitudes that encourage
silence and secretiveness around the family and cultural taboos. It was
understood that loyalty to one's family required silence. as my
metamorphosis into adulthood progressed, my subconscious voice was no
longer willing to be silenced, speaking to me through dreams, memories
and visions.
As an artist, I consciously engage in revealing the unconscious
influences of familial, social and cultural ideology on our sense of
self and our worldview, on our interpretation or "reading" of the world
around us. In doing so, I acknowledge that I cannot exclude myself
entirely from this critique as I slip back and forth between a cultural
position of privilege to cultural position of exclusion.
My new media works reflect the postmodern experience of endless source
of information that influences the formation, or malformation, of
identity. In this series I explore the notion of loss of identity and
it essentially shows how:
"People find my cross cultural background, being an Asian brought up in
a rich oriental cultural environment and influenced by the western
culture, interesting.
Being an Asian with multi cultural backgrounds, I often feel loss of identity.
The mixture of "Think like a Westerner and feel like an Asian" or
"Think like an Asian and feel like a Westerner" causes confusion and
disorientation when I deal with personal problems which in turn
inevitably informs my art works."
The successful confrontation of my own history was due greatly to my
new media works, and the difficult self-examination that fueled
it. After my 1 ½
years of art education and artistic self-absorption in Australia, I
could finally see beyond myself, and the relief was profound. I am now
better equipped to speak to in a more universal voice.
