At its core what it means to be an artist is pretty simple. To me being an artist means being someone who takes the ideas they have in their head and does their best to manifest them in the world. It is a struggle to bring ideas into the world, but through hard work, revision, and practice an artist continually develops their ideas and brings them into the world to share them with others. Working to be an artist develops into this kind of mentality of improvement. Being an artist is continually critiquing your own work and working to improve yourself. It is never settling in the same rut forever, but continually experimenting. It is looking at the same idea from every perspective possible. It is using your mistakes as a way to improve rather than an excuse to flounder Painters, sculptures, writers, singers, musicians, videographers, and so on are all artists. To me, even computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and so on are all artists. They bring their ideas of how to best solve a problem with a series of steps into the world, of how to relate numbers with equations, and of how to describe their idea of how the world works with models. Being an artist means using creativity to create ideas and make them a reality. An artist should try to make people feel or understand or think.

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My work consists of a variety of pieces in different mediums and styles reflecting my curiosity and love for experimentation. I love to use vivid colors and areas of intense black to immediately catch my viewer’s attention along with dynamic mark-making to guide the eye and impose a sense of labor on the viewer. I want my audience to see how much effort and many strokes it took to create my art. That is why my favorite medium to work in is pen, but I also love working in other mediums so I can focus more on color to mix things up. Each piece I chose to be a part of my work was chosen since it successfully conveys a feeling, story, or perspective that I wanted to portray. When people look at my work I want them to be drawn to ask what the story behind my artwork is. What was the artist feeling when he created this? What does he feel about this subject?  I want them to ponder over my work and be moved to feel the same emotions I felt and tried to capture in my work. I want them to understand how I felt despair being trapped in my room during quarantine, I want them to feel nostalgic looking at my memories of the park near my house and my friend and I getting boba, I want them to feel peace looking a simple tool on a table, and I want them to feel claustrophobic at the way plastic is filling the world.
 

My main goal as an artist is to encourage people to take the time to think about their own lives and how they feel. Today the world is very busy and many people’s lives are nonstop. When people do finally have the time to relax they often do so by watching a show browsing social media which only acts as a distraction and does not help people deal with what is going on around them. The process of creation in art has become a type of self-meditation improving my life. It has allowed me to become more in tune with myself and how I feel. In a world where many people are not taking the time to think about themselves, their lives, what they feel, and what they want, I want my art to make people stop, sit back, and reflect on what they are dealing with at their stage in life. In order to achieve this, I want to make artwork that is itself a reflection on my life. I will infuse this work with my emotions by drawing on my own life experiences to tell stories. It is my hope that these stories from my life will be able to inspire the people who see my work to think about their own lives and their own stories. Are they where they want to be? Are they doing what they want to be doing?