Photography taught me how to observe the world, Interactive art challenged me to reexamine the relationship between art and the audience, and the study of Visual Cultures allowed me to encapsulate all these studies in the context of modern art history. In London, I studied intuitive intention in making art. I surveyed unintentional forces that drive the artist to create artwork with a certain trajectory. How do we find order in seeming chaos?

I have been attempting to extend art as a form of living, beyond a merely institutional discipline. I explore how, through arts, we can connect to ourselves, to each other, and to the world around us. Since life itself is improvised, improvisation has become my general method and conceptual ground for art and life. I see life as a form of art, and my artistic products are the trails or residues of the process of living.

My art practice is interdisciplinary in essence. Dancing has influenced the way I make visual art; I tend to pursue abstraction rather than representation. [My performance works are found at soeine.net.] Conversely, my visual art background shapes the way I understand dance; I interpret body movements in the contexts of visual art practice. In addition, I have been interested in sound art in recent years. I have tried to merge visual art, sound art, and dance in a form of site-specific performance.

Working with the body brings me close to the materiality of things and makes me aware of its constant change, which frustrates our human desire for permanence. I contemplate the material itself to witness its process of change. This contemplation allows me to improvise my reception of the objects at the given time and in the given space.

I search for alternative ways to make and present my art. That gives richer contexts in relation to people’s lives, which the white cubes of conventional galleries cannot provide. In this sense, art becomes an ongoing process. I contextualize my art within the given environment, including harsh weather, graffiti, vandalism, and tagging. Instead of regarding these events only as undesirable, I want to consider them in making my images. As with those objects that I salvage from daily life, these mundane events may give me opportunities to tell the stories of the place in unexpected ways.