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Choichun Leung talks to SML about her mixed media paintings during the 13th Annual Art Under the Bridge Festival organized by the Dumbo Arts Center in New York City in 2009.
Collective Art Profile - Choichun Leung There is a playful tension in Choichun's paintings. Without warning you find yourself pulled between two poles. It is said we are hardwired to seek out recognizable patterns, my first steps into Choichun's work led me to do just that. While looking for words and symbols, I found my mind dancing between this hunt for the known, and for what I have come to think is the real nature of her work, a record of the motion of her mind and body.
Where are you from? "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch" ...it's a small village in North Wales. I'm half chinese and half british and grew up in my familiy's Chinese take-away restaurant so it wasn't like I was tending sheep, though. Are you formally educated and what influence has it had on you and your work? Maybe "formerly" educated, you might want to say. I don't really know what I know anymore. I studied metal smithing in college and I think the patination of metals comes through in a lot of my surfaces now but I try not to think about it too much. Red and turquoises, in hindsight is what many metals turned with age and what I find I gravitate to. I use things now that I never studied like layers upon layers of paint for texture, glass powder, and sanding down canvases to reveal what's underneath. What is your inspiration? "Perspiration" mostly. If you mean impetus for what comes out, it's probably just my dreams and subconscious emotions that come up. I get excited by what gets revealed or discovered, so like to stay with that when it happens. I also just get inspiration from the act of painting itself -- not the concept. I like that you can reveal something that you were not aware of. I gravitate to work where the piece is definitely from that moment in time , which cannot be replicated . What is your work process? I work with the canvasses laying flat on the floor as well as against the wall. I like to build up a surface using glass powders and pigments, and scripting throughout -- what I call ' glyphs' , which have become like a personal language that I also don't like to think too much about, but I find myself scribbling them all the time. I also use washes and lots of thread. I keep building up or sanding down a painting until I feel its done. I use sticks, brushes, trowels to scratch through the surfaces, I also pour paint on the canvases in washes or with more heavy paint using bottles. Some paintings are instantaneous and some are labored over, salvaged and completely redone. I work on 5- 10 different canvasses at a time, so when one is drying I can work on the next. I do a lot of this I think so I don't have to stop and think too much which gets in my way. What are you working on now? A series of pieces using mostly thread and acrylic. i have done many small studies and am now starting on the big canvases.
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