Artist Statement

Art, Literature, and Life

My works challenge the phonocentric traditions of textuality and poetry. My work explores artistic and literary elements using ASL (American Sign Language) in narrativity, poetry, calligraphy, and performance art.

Performativity, Arche-writing, and "Arche-speaking"

Through sign language art, my works explore grammatology (art/science of writing) and various ways of writing/speaking with a unique blend of cinematic vocabulary, lingual choreography, verbal calligraphy, poetry, and storytelling techniques, using ASL.

My body is the primary writing instrument. In arche-writing, my body in performance scribes in the air with or without materials. Video is not regarded for me as traditionally image-producing; rather, it is treated as a multi-dimensional, digital-temporal paper to scribe on. Surfaces, for me, are the materials that capture a trace of language.

Note: by the term "speaking," I am not referred to "vocally speaking;" rather, it is defined as a verbal form, whether its modality is visual-manual or vocal-auditory (known as sign language and speech language, respectively).

Keywords

grammatology, performativity, poetry, verbal calligraphy, textuality, language art, lingual choreography, cinematic vocabulary, literary art, narrative, photocalligraphy, Derrida, logocentrism, arche-writing, deconstruction and reconstruction of language, trace, erasure, palimpsest.

Mediums

video, performance, photography, web art, text, mixed media.