Mentioned in the Boston Globe today

I was mentioned in an article in the Boston Globe today. It featured one of my photos as well, though I just realized that my name is not credited in the caption... The article is about our last show in the Medford Square space at 13FOREST Gallery before moving to Arlington.

Here is the article!

Upcoming Exhibit

I'll be showing my work with Sand T and Sophie Glikson at TV3 in Medford from January 10 - February 10. This is going to be a very exciting show, as we are all very different artists.

I have never shown so many black and white pieces in one show, and I'm looking forward to it.

Snow in Boston

I'm feeling very depressed about having to dig my car out. Just waiting for the caffeine to kick in my bloodstream before starting the task.

The ICA, No Name Restaurant, and the Boston Fish Pier

I became a member of the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) recently, and I decided to go back with my friend Bénédicte to see the current exhibit DESIGN LIFE NOW in the West Gallery (through January 6, 2008). This show has some of the best designs from 2003-2006 across many industries. This is my second visit to the show and I still haven't seen everything. The membership at the ICA is definitely worth it. I will go back again with Ken and my cousins this weekend, and possibly again sometime with my former assistant Stephen.

I discovered the No Name Restaurant recently in the process of photographing my client's wedding. What wonderful fish and chips! For those who don't know about the No Name Restaurant, it's located right on the Fish Pier, meaning that the fish is completely fresh, of course. I felt like having a beer today, and I ordered a Budweiser Select, just out of curiosity. A terrible mistake. It's a little more flavorful than club soda. Bénédicte enjoyed the meal with a Harpoon ale. She has a few more months in Boston before returning to France, and she said she would bring her husband Nicolas back to the restaurant.

Finally, a word about the fresh fish from the pier. About a year ago, I blogged about grocery shopping in Boston, and coincidentally, today I was contacted by a David Barkay in Montreal who actually read my blog entry (check out David Barkay's blog). I've been meaning to add to that entry regarding my recent find about the fish, and now I'm motivated to do so.

I have stopped buying fish from supermarkets in Boston. I am so spoiled by the fish at the fish pier that there is no reason to buy from the supermarkets. The seafood companies are mainly wholesalers, but they will sell retail if you ask for something they have. I just bought 4 lbs of bluefish from Bramante Seafood yesterday and roasted 2 lbs in the oven last night with ginger and spiced salt (a mixture of cayenne, paprika, and salt). My mouth is still watering at the thought of last night's dinner.

Now back to work...

Joyce Tenneson at the Griffin Museum of Photography

My friend Bénédicte and I went to see Joyce Tenneson speak at the Griffin Museum tonight. The show is up through August 12,

Joyce kicked off the talk with a couple of Powerpoint slideshows, the first of which was a selection of images from her new book, a retrospective of four decades' worth work.

As she got up to speak at the end of the slideshows, she welled up with tears over the images from her Wise Women series featuring women over 65. The late Jessica Tandy was one of them. Joyce has always photographed from the heart, and she got to know some of these women very well in preparation of her portraits of them. She loved them and wanted to be close friends with them. She explained that she got emotional over them because it was the first time she looked at the slideshow on a big screen with music like this.

She apologized, but of course, we more than forgive her. We just love her that much more for getting emotional. Well, I'm speaking for myself at least.

Wise Women happens to be my favorite body of work by Joyce Tenneson, and I was happy that she was so attached to it. It's her least stylized body of work because she really wanted the women's characters to speak for themselves, and so there weren't any special backgrounds that may distract the viewer from the subject. Pretty young starlets will please the vast majority of the public no matter how poorly you photograph them. Being able to distill the inner beauty from an older woman is something only a master artist like Joyce can do. It's likely that a young male will look at this body of work and say that he has no interest in viewing, but young, shallow boys are irrelevant here. Wise Women will only speak to other wise women, women seeking wisdom, and maybe a few worthy wise men.

The session was then opened to Q&A. I learned the process by which she used to mount her large flower images.

Ken's new short story

My husband Ken won another writing contest recently. The story "Beneath the Language" is now published at http://www.onthepremises.com/issue_02/story_02_1.html

You can see another of Ken's published stories "Algorithms for Love" at Strange Horizons.

StoryLINES at artSPACE@16 in Malden

If you haven't been to http://artspaceat16.com/currentexhibition.htm's new show, go see it before it closes on June 9th. It features sculptures by Pamela Sheridan, paintings by Sam Tan, and photography by Brian Doan.

I stopped by this show for the first time two Thursdays ago and was immensely moved by Brian Doan's large format photographs of Vietnamese Americans in his series Dreamland, particularly one of a Vietnamese American young man in a U.S. Army uniform. This young man is now deployed in Iraq. Blurred in the background of this portrait is a movie poster of Apocalpyse Now.

I felt such strong emotions when I looked at this photograph because Asian Americans always have the need to prove to the rest of America that we are Americans, and the Vietnamese American soldier's portrait is great proof. And of course, the allusion to the Vietnam War just a few decades ago reminds us how once again America is "fighting for democracy" today, but it is just that much more poignant that this young Vietnamese American man, whose parents probably came to the U.S. as refugees from the Vietnam War, is now risking his life for the U.S. government for another war.

Upon browsing through his website and seeing more samples of his work, it struck me how Brian's subjects all display a sense of their own dignity. The rarity of any Asian Americans portrayed with dignity in photographs is astounding. Asian American women are often stereotyped as sex objects in commercial photographs, and Asian American men are either ignored, or portrayed as effeminates. And sadly, oftentimes Asian Americans themselves pertetuate and reinforce such stereotypes. Brian's work is very important to the whole Asian American community and in getting a voice out to the larger American society, not just Vietnamese Americans.

I returned to artSPACE@16 to meet Brian during the artist talk on May, 24th. Brian was an engineer who decided to become a full-time artist, to the dismay of his parents and others around him. Vietnamese immigrant parents, like Chinese immigrant parents, all wish for their kids to have a steady job that earns a lot of money.

Pam Sheridan was not an abstract artist until she was diagnosed with cancer (from which she is now recovered fortunately). Here, on the left, you can see details from one of her sculptures Paradox at artSPACE. The sculpture is about 5 feet in height and is made entirely of intricately woven barbed wires, colored threads and painted spherical shapes.

I had come across Sam Tan's paintings about a year ago in Arlington. His works are often characterized by two juxtaposing patterns and very bright, often complementary colors. In this current show (shown on right), his paintings from the Mindful Landscapes series employ cadmium orange and cobalt teal acrylic paints -- ultra intense, complementary colors in their pure forms. Sam wove them into webs of abstract shapes that remind the viewers of arteries and organs and their own mortality.

Sand T has once again put together another extraordinary show.