For Thich Quang Duc (1,000 Tags), 2006
Oil on canvas
61" x 96"
In my earlier paintings, I was focused on the possible phenomenological effect upon the viewer
through the use of color, depicted movement and scale. The paintings were based upon installations incorporating 1,000 paper tags.
Paper signified for me a possible alchemy; in Vietnam, it is used in rituals of ancestral worship. Objects that are of value in the
material world are made out of paper and burned as offerings, and in the process sent to the ancestral realm; this idea of transporting
materials between realms through a physical transformation fascinates me-I applied this idea to my concept of painting. I was
interested in how the tags could be manipulated for imagery that could, at another scale, approximate a feeling of being immersed
in nature. Perhaps painting could be a way of fabricating the sublime within our boxed spaces, within everyday reality. But the
sublime, and a desire for the sublime in art, is complicated by the fact of prosaic human experience.
