Self Series, 2017
Mixed media

This work begins with an inquiry into the “self,” extending from the tradition of portrait painting. Unlike traditional portraiture, which fixes a person within a particular moment of being seen and depicted, the “self-portrait” in this work is not a fixed image, but a fluid and interactive reflection—one that appears and disappears, flickering in and out of presence.
 

The work is both a projection of the artist’s own self and, through the viewer’s participation, a self-image of each person who encounters it. Yet this image does not equate to the viewer’s truest self. It has been transformed through the artist’s emotion, perspective, and formal intervention, just as every portrait inevitably carries the gaze and touch of its maker.
 

The work also resonates with Charles Horton Cooley’s concept of the “looking-glass self”: the self does not emerge in isolation, but is gradually formed through imagining how others see and judge us.