New Years Bloopers 2011

2011 was a crazy year for me. My artwork really took off, and I've been producing more stuff more quickly than I ever have before. I finished two major projects this year, but it wasn't easy, and there were a lot of mishaps along the way. I would like to take this chance to celebrate some of my year's many failures. Although I had many success this past year, it took a lot of failure to get there.


Florox 10th anniversary crew pose, I don't think I've ever tried to coordinate a single shot with a bigger group of people. I don't know why, but I actually thought it wasn't gonna be too hard. As with most things involved in Florox crew activities, we went in with a plan, and then chaos ensued. But in the end, the shot came out great and we had a hell of a lot of fun doing it. I felt like this was definitely a big achievement of mine this year, and has remained my most popular post yet.


For some reason, I didn't think that they had buildings in hawaii. Then when I landed in Honolulu back in April, I thought to myself "OF COURSE THEY HAVE BUILDINGS YOU IDIOT!" But then I realized, "that's because all the pictures I've seen from hawaii are landscapes and beaches." So I made it a point to take a some pictures of the city to bring back back with me to the mainland. Then when I got back I promptly did absolutely nothing with them.


I was gonna sell T-Shirts through the blog earlier this year. I even bought a box of 100 of 'em, and then realized I have a plan for shipping and distributing them. I also had no packaging plan, so the people who did order shirts usually got them in chinese takeout boxes (leftover not from food! But from a previous failed art project). Then I decided I was going to add a webstore section to my site. But after looking at a few other retail sites I decided it would be a lot more complicated than I was ready for.


But I think the idea of a webstore to sell some of my t-shirts, poster, and other media is still a good one, and promise to work harder in the new year to make it a reality.


This was the start to one of my many projects that would never make it, or are taking a lot longer that I expected rather. My "Super Ego" project. The idea was to take portraits, print them out and let people draw on their own photo to complete the work. I was going to have something like 20 portraits done, and then I would throw a party to gather everyone together to see what we'd come up with. But I never quite made it to 20, so I never printed any of them.


After a year of people telling me that I look like Dae Han from the classic 80s action flick "Best of the Best," I decided to be him for halloween. But then nobody recognized my costume. This was the only picture taken of me that night. Problems Kru ninjas, this was taken for YOU!


During the time I was showing at the "New England Photo Biennial" My mom told me I was featured in a Chinese American newspaper the World Journal. I spoke with a journalist, and sent them this picture. When I received the article a week later I realized I couldn't read it.


When I started the BBoy Monsters I had no idea what I was doing. I even told Liem that we were testing it out, and in all likelihood it would end it being a gigantic fail. But then it didn't, and I'm thankful to have friends that are willing try out my bad ideas with me.


Here's an outtake from step2's shoot. I thought this pic was good, but I'd just be repeating myself with the 3 arms thing. In dance, and in art, I have learned that with any creative endeavor, it's a lot more interesting when you don't repeat yourself.



My last minute art making effort of 2011 now complete. Friends, I shall meet you in the future!!!

BBoy Monsters: STEP-2(000)

As a BBoy myself, I have always been well aware of the limitations of my body. There are some moves will always be just so slightly out of your reach, never meant for me to have. Maybe I don't have the enough: balance, strength, flexibility, musicality, or any combination of the above. Then sometimes those moves just requires magical powers.

Step2 has always been a guy who has air of magic about the way he dances. He's the kinda guy that makes the hard stuff look easy. Throughout my 10 years in the Boston BBoy scene, he's always been one of the smoothest guys in the room. These were taken during my shoot with Baldi yesterday and put together this morning/last night. I know when I'm onto something good if I'm losing sleep over it. I had a lot more technical problems with these images than I did with the ones in my previous post. But I think in the end it was all well worth the effort.

I have to hurry up and make new work before the new year!! Still more to come, stay tuned...

Extra Heads and Extra Limbs

When I asked for volunteers to become bboy monsters in my last post, I got exactly one reply.

Luckily that reply was the infamous, unnaturally talented - BBoy Baldi. Today was the day we finally got together to try out some ideas. This is what we came up with. Happy Holidays folks! More coming soon!!!

BBoy Monster: Heat Rock One

As of today BBoy Monsters is now officially an ongoing series. I am currently looking for more models, so if any readers/bboys are interested in participating in this project please leave me a comment (and make me feel important) or contact me through other means such as email, facebook, etc. Special thanks to my good friend BBoy Heat Rock One for posing for me earlier today!! You guys can expect more of this work in the near future.

BBoy Monster

It feels good to have an idea I'm excited about again.

After finally finding myself a job or two, I have spent most of the last month and a half in training/adjusting to the work-man's life. That is to say, I've done very little art making outside of the occasional awful sketches I make in my sketch book. But on the bright side, I've finally discovered away to support myself (though it doesn't involve making art). Although I don't get as much time to just make stuff anymore, I do feel much more liberated now to make the kind of work that I want.

This picture was inspired by a Korean artist who goes by the name: Spunky Zoe. When I first saw her work online a few weeks back, it felt like I was snorting 3.5 grams of pure awesome into my brain. Her work was so addicting I couldn't get it out of my mind for days. This picture is the product of that experience. Special thanks to the multi-talented Jet Liem of Problemz Kru for being my guinea pig and giving a ninja a chance. May you have smooth sailing ahead of you my friend!!!

Happy Halloween!!

My saturday night was filled with alcohol and destruction. This is a little memento from the night, hope your Halloween celebrations were as interesting as well as ours!!!

(*&@#!@(*&

I've been kinda strapped for ideas recently. While getting some press is good and all, it does very little if you're not making any new work. Since I haven't done any surrealist stuff in a while I thought I'd share this Dali inspired piece I made earlier today. This isn't what I would call "finished" work, but I wanted to see if the idea is any good.

I'm Famous!!!

As my friends who ride the subway a lot in Boston probably already know, I was featured in this week's Dig. I'M FAMOUS NOW SUCKAS!!!! Well, not quite. But pick one up and support your local artist!!! It's FREE!

High Society

My mom asked me to take pictures for some fancy party that her company was hosting the other night. These pictures probably won't make their edit, but they're fun to look at anyway.

  I didn't know chinese dolls that came in brack!

  I've decided pictures of old people look a lot more interesting than pictures of young people. This was suppose to be some kinda asian event. So I have no idea where this guy came from, but he looked awesome.

  This dude looked like he walked straight out of a Martin Scorsese movie

  Another awesome old guy.

  The guy on the left wins the prize for "Most Facial Hair I've Ever Seen on an Asian" a.k.a the MFHIESA award. He's even got more than me!

  Asians and cameras.

  This guy had the most ballerific hair ever.

Memories

I go home just about every Sunday to go see my parents. I do this in part, to keep up the illusion that I'm a good son, but also to make myself feel a little less guilty about not being around for the five years I was at school (and getting into trouble). This past Sunday I found an old photo album containing pictures from when I was a rittle baby. It occurred to me while I was flipping through my old photos, that most people take pictures to help them remember stuff (or at least they used to anyway). Of course my mom had pictures of all the big moments from the first decade of my life, things such as birthdays, school pictures, and meeting Micky Mouse at disneyland. I'm sure these probably seemed like important things to me at the time, but fast forward a couple of years and many drinks later, I don't remember shit anymore. I probably spend more time trying to forget all the embarrassing moments of my life than I do remembering any of the good ones. When I realized this, I thought it was kind of funny that I decided to become a photographer, because when I take pictures I'm essentially making up memories I never had. Then again, it seems to me like most pictures are taken of skewed memories anyway.

One of the things that did came back to me as I was looking through my chubby baby pictures though, was the texture of stuff. In every picture I saw, I could still remember the way stuff felt as I crawled, lounged, and climbed my way through life. Even though I don't remember being a baby, I can still remember the way that blanket particular felt on my chubby little face as I would cried for attention (and food!).

Back After the Break

It's been a while. I would have updated sooner, but the truth is I haven't been making much work in the last two weeks. In some ways I needed a mental break after the completion of my "world of one" series. Plus I also really need to get my shit together so I might actually have a future worth looking forward to. Thus there was a solid two weeks in there where I wasn't making any work, but eventually I started to feel like I was losing my grip on reality. Basically, I decided I just had to go out and shoot something...ANYTHING! As I walked around taking pictures of stupid little shit that I found, shooting actually started to become fun again. For the first time, in what felt like a long time, I wasn't so concerned with the finished product and was enjoying the process of shooting again. Playtime aside, I've got some big plans coming in the next few weeks and will be launching some t-shirts along with a webstore soon.

Be sure to check back in a week or two for a surprise explosion of awesome.

World of One: Diffusion

I'm celebrating today. Today I have reached my goal of 8-10 World of One pictures by the end of the summer. I'm pretty happy with the way that the project has turned out. Although I still have some ideas to go along with this theme, I think I'm ready to start playing with some new ideas for a while.

This image is titled "Diffusion." Currently it is number 8/8 in the series. It looks a bit more complicated than some of the previous images in the series, but this one actually has less layers than a lot of the others which came before it.

It's been a wild ride, thanks to everyone for their love and support!!

World of Two

I'm now taking commissions!!! I can do composite pictures not just of myself, but of other people too!!! So if any of you loyal readers out there have ever thought it might be cool to have a "World of One" style picture of yourself doing x, y, and z, hit me up and we can work something out!!!

This is a sample shot I took of my friends Eddie and Katya, both of which are great dancers, friends and a couple, in addition to being awesome hosts while I was there. This shot was so much easier to do than the ones I've shot of myself, probably because I was finally back behind the camera where I belong puhahahaha.

Pricing for each commission is negotiable depending, on how complicated of a shot you want/how much work it'll take, but generally I'll be able to do it for about $300 with an average turnaround time of 2-3 days.

Anyone need some non-traditional (aka not boring) wedding/engagement/birthday/bat mitzfah pictures???

Travel Fail

I am really bad at traveling, and I just returned from a weekend trip to new york last night. I thought I was being smart by buying my boltbus ticket a few days early online. But apparently I suck at reading websites or something, because I bought a ticket for the wrong date. This was something I didn't even notice until I was the last in line for my bus. So it was on to plan b) the chinatown bus (or what we used to call the "SARS bus"). While I was waiting inline I looked over and noticed how almost all the people in the megabus line across from me were white, while my lucky star line was packed full of minorities. I took this picture when I finally arrived in chinatown hours later, after battling many hours of traffic.



On my way back I spent most of the first hour trying not to puke. I normally don't get motion sickness, but I was quite hungover from the night before and was discovering just how bad it was as the day went on. On the way back I read a book, drew a picture, and took this photo.

Fat Chair

It's been a while since I shared some straight photography here. About a month ago I tried to shoot a photograph everyday for an entire month. But like a fat kid on a diet, I was only able to keep up the regiment for about two weeks before I stopped. Instead I just got lost in my editing for the World of One stuff I've been doing. I picked up my camera again the other day however, this was one of the first things that I shot.

World of One: Trip

Somedays, I feel like I sabotage myself....

World of One: Ninja

I started this body of work around this time last year with "Dichotomy." At the time, I had no real intentions of making it into a series, I just wanted to see if I could do it. One of my best friends had suddenly up and died on me, and I was grieving. In my state, I wanted to create something just for the hell of it. Not because I thought it was clever or meaningful or anything like that, but because I knew it would look cool. In short, I wanted to make something I knew my friend would have been crazy about. A year later, I still don't feel the same, I still don't feel "normal" and don't believe I ever will. But as a byproduct of this event in my life, my artwork has changed dramatically. Since "dichotomy" my work has never been the same again. I am working very hard now to complete this body of work before the cold weather gets here.

All that being said, I think this is the coolest looking thing I've ever done!

I read a lot of manga (japanese comics for you n00bs out there), and one of my favorites hands down is "Naruto" (shush! you manga snobs!!). Naruto (the main protagonist of the series) has a signature move where he makes hundreds of clones of himself to help him fight. It's dawned on me just recently how much this body of work resembles some of Kishimoto's panels. Sometimes you just see things and internalize them without realizing it. Then sometimes it'll regurgitates itself into things like this.

I will be shooting another one of these today, and I promise this one will be a bit more...interactive than the pervious. I guess I've got enough of these out there now that people have some sort of rubric to judge them on, and a number of people have been telling me that they wish the figures interacted with each other more. These are sentiments I've had as well, and although I'm not sure how I'm going to achieve that, I'm willing to give it a shot.

World of One: Paradox 2.0

I thought I could do better, and I believe I have. This is "Paradox 2.0." You could say the image I shared in my last post was like the prototype for this one. I meant to show this earlier this week but it took me a lot longer to put this together than I thought it would.

When I went back to the drawing board after making the first "Paradox," I realized I what I thought was missing was the movement/drama in my composition that you see in the other World of One pictures. The day that we went to go shoot, I also decided that I was sick of looking at the same kind of background and picked a different location for the shoot (this one is by Chinatown).

Special thanks to my buddy Ivan for pressing the button and for helping with the shoot!!! I wouldn't have been able to do it without you. Check back in a few days, the next naruto/ninja inspired picture in this series is already in the works.

On Failure

The road to success is paved in failure. These are words that I firmly believe in. Pretty much all my heroes these days attribute epic failures as an integral part of their successes. For me, this image was a complete fail. But as a result, I learned much more about myself from this image, than any of the others I've created in this series. I put close to three days worth of work into this picture, and when I was finished, it was the most complicated image I had ever put together. But for one reason or another I was just not that into it, and promptly decided it was a failure. It's not that I thought this image was bad, but I knew I could make it better. I knew that there was something missing from it that made me not like it.

The image I'm working on right now, is the 2.0 version. It's already crashed on me once (never happened to me before), wiping out over an hour's worth of work. I was livid, but now I know that when this is done I can be proud, and it'll all be worth it.

World of One: Focus

We don't all look the same!!! Except when we all look the same...

My ideas for these projects are starting to build off one another. At first I wanted to just mess with the configurations of the different figures (for some reason I never think of the guys in these images as myself) but I think I will start to do more of these imaginary instillations in other areas now too. I've started using the term "imaginary instillations" probably because people look at me like I'm crazy when I'm shooting them, and also because they don't really exist except in the reality I've created with my pictures. The more of these I do, the more technically savvy I feel like I am becoming. Each one is has become increasingly more complex than the last. As a good friend of mine would say "Progression is here!!!"

I just finished shooting another one of these earlier this week, and will be putting it together later today. I'm starting to get restless with this project, not because I think what I'm doing is not worthwhile, but more because I want to start working on some other projects, but this one eats up so much time. My drawings thus far have been a fail, but I think i'm gonna start drawing more stuff that I like, and actually take some time to make it good. It makes a huge difference when I actually try, but for some reason or another (laziness...mostly laziness) I sometimes don't.

Midnight Storms

Been having some trouble sleeping at night. But on a night like this, it's probably more exciting to stay awake anyway. Currently trying to make some changes in my life and get my shit together. I'm making 1 drawing and taking 1 picture everyday now, in an attempt to push myself artistically (still hate drawing) and increase output. It's dawned on me that if I wanna do a lot of the stuff I wanna do, i'm going to have to really learn how to draw sooner or later. Maybe if I ever draw something I actually really like i'll put it up. But until then, here are some more pictures of my window.

World of One: Battle

It feels like I've waited my entire life to make this image.

Sleepless Nights

The words of artist David Choe ring in my ears "You got to wok harda, you know? While you're sleeping i'm still drawing'. I'm on tour i'm drawing. I go home, i'm drawing. I wake up in the morning I'm drawing in the mirror. I don't have to, but I like to so, you have to try harda, you have to wok harda."

You see all kinds of cool shit when everyone else is sleeping. I myself have always loved night photography. As photographers we always remember that first picture we made that got us hooked. Most people in the world know what it's like to take a picture, but when you make that first image that becomes more than a social document, you will remember it forever. For a guy like me, one of my biggest influences in art are the surrealists (obviously). But in particular there was this one guy named Brassai, whose pictures showed me that the world can be surreal if you're looking for it.

I was looking out my window last night and I saw some guys working on the mass pike near my apartment. Whenever I pass by night workers on the highway at night, I always feel like i'm entering a strange and different world. Them big lights just make everything look so freaking cool. So as the world slept, I went out to capture what I saw, and I'm glad that I did.

When in Doubt

Sometimes it's good to revisit old ideas with what newfound knowledge you might have earned. I've been working all weekend on some new World of One stuff, and failing miserably at it. This is the first time I've failed making an image for this series (and is also reminding me why I've been so adamant about doing more). I think I know how to fix it now though so that really just translates to more work this week. It's not even that the image came out bad, it's just that I know it's not as good as it probably could and should be. It can really suck knowing what you're doing at times, so I've decided that I'm probably over thinking it and am just gonna blast it with random elements.

All that is gonna have to wait until later though, mostly because i'm actually gonna have to reshoot that idea. So for today I decided to work on other stuff instead. I was gonna shoot my buddy ivan with my t-shirt on in an attempt to make it more marketable to dudes (it's suppose to be a unisex tee after all). But then again I figured you can't really beat a cute girl, so I'm not even gonna try. This is what we came up with kinda just fuckin' around with ideas.


Herro! Peekaboo!



Yo gimme a hand here!