My current work explores abstraction through the aesthetic experience of Chinese Scholar's Gardens. Inspired by researching East Asian art history during my undergraduate studies at UCLA and later visiting traditional gardens across China's Jiangsu region while living in Shanghai, I find profound value in these spaces' conceptual premise. Hidden beyond bone-white walls, the Scholar's Garden is revealed only in passing. Countless passages and planes, distant and near, are framed within labyrinthine pathways, zigzagging cobblestone, and meandering streams. The experience of the garden coheres only through fragments: delicate flowers existing in impermanent beauty against void-like backdrops, scholar's rocks creating microcosms of illogical landscapes — mountains, waterfalls, moss-covered fields — all held momentarily before dissolving. At center, a vacuous lake: the heart of the garden left vacant, yet within its void, a reflection of all things around it.

The garden embodies contradiction — decorative yet philosophical, present yet empty — which I translate into painting. I paint this garden as it unfolds into spatial choreography, alternating between macro and microcosmic views through confused scale shifts. Points of view shift along snaking corridors. Negative space becomes positive and positive back to negative as paths turn right, left, up, and down. These spaces present an infinite visual economy of impossibilities.

Using oil, collaged canvas, and handmade papers, I build structure and then break it apart — splicing different views and moments into a single surface. Collage both constructs gnarled materiality and cuts into it, opening windows onto varying histories and speeds. The bare canvas acts as backdrop and void, mirroring how gardens extend infinitely beyond their whitewashed walls. Like the garden's heart — empty yet containing all things around it — my paintings explore the tensions between building and breaking, presence and absence, creating a visual language that embraces multiplicity. I aim to present abstraction as something as challenging as it is beautiful.