Artist’s Statement

Li-lan

I work with the visual language of letters, envelopes, postcards, stamps, and other imagery related to written, cross-cultural correspondence in my paintings and drawings. My enlarged reproductions of these common, everyday items often bear the traces of their transmission through time and space. Many of them include cancellation marks, return-to-sender stamps, and other indications which evoke issues of communication often creating a feeling of frustrated or misdirected messages. Letters sent, received, lost and returned suggest the complexities of communication.

I often play with images derived from photographs printed on postcards and stamps in my work. By using representations of buildings, bridges, and other monuments, I dramatize the tension between the flatness of canvas and the vast, three-dimensional spaces defined by architectural forms. I enjoy juxtaposing the patterning of postal ephemera with imagery that ultimately shuttles the viewer from examining the minutiae of a stamp’s ragged edge through vast architectural spaces of foreign lands. A postmark might overlay an image from an entirely opposite end of the world, highlighting the cross-pollination of contemporary globalisation.

This emphasis on communication across cultural boundaries has a personal resonance, often allowing my works to function as self-portraiture. I have included in some pieces an image of my eye fashioned into a repeating stamp motif. It functions not only to represent my own unique vision as an artist, but also references to how others perceive me. Western culture typically uses the eyes as a defining physical feature of Asian identity. Enmeshed in a pastiche of overlapping places and moments, the eyes join with other images from all over the world to form a complex picture of how we define ourselves as individuals in a global context.