This is the first panel in the image poem “Your Presence is Requested” from Prosthetic Cosmologies. My artist statement follows.
My work aims to make visible the shared processes – cultural, environmental, political, and economic – that define daily life in both the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America. I believe that any person, any organism, any word, indeed, any object, connects us in transformative dependency and as yet unrecognized possibility. I proceed in the faith that respectful seeing reveals the structure of interconnection and new forms of hope. I compose images that testify to the poetic beauty of this complexity.
While at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, I added ten panels to an ongoing series of image-poems entitled Prosthetic Cosmologies, which chronicles the globalizing myths that situate Shenzhen across diverse levels of historical experience. The formal structure of each image-poem combines genre conventions from classical Chinese poetry, anthropological theories about the human quest for meaning, and photographic images from Shenzhen and elsewhere. I used my time at Sitka both to reflect on the mythmaking that emerges in delta cultures and to track those myths along the Oregon Coast.
Shenzhen Noted 