As an artist, I am always fascinated by the digital technology, but at the same time, I do not want my art to be just as a display of what technology can do. I start to ask myself some fundamental questions: How does the new technology relate to our past? How does it relate to the human psyche.
I take the digital language to its purest form which is "0" and "1", or "yes" and "no", I believe this language is rooted in a very ancient language and can be traced back to the Chinese "Yi Jing" or "The Book of Change". I use this simple yet complicated language as a metaphor for a notion of time, which is not linear but transparent. By using this language I want to start a dialogue between technology and human psychology, between past and present, between new and old. I am using this language to investigate the relationship between two dimensional illusion and three dimensional reality, the tangible and intangible, and the perception of seeing.
These works, primarily formal portraiture approached in a pointillist style are actually drawings made by repeatedly and meditatively burning holes in silk and paper, or, writing of Chinese characters, to create the images. From a distance these subtle works appear digitally scanned, not hand crafted, and hope to lead viewers toward an investigation of the advent of technology in image making. The reduction of these psychological portraits to a basic digital language addressees questions of how the use of a technological language effects the psychology of the individual; how it effects our understanding of time and of our visual perception of dimensional representation.
Baochi