“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet… The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
- Walter Benjamin
The Momentum series is about the inescapable temporality of life and explores our desire to grip onto the moment. Our existences are impermanent, unceasingly changing. Life is fleeting, and I see every instant as a mere passage of our journey.
As moment passes to moment, each slice of time is as impossible to hold as a constantly flowing steam of water.
I try to paint this swift moment, capturing the human face as it privately contemplates each consecutive moment. In doing so, I discover that there is no identity, and the boundaries between individuals begins to dissolve. I can see you in myself, and there is no difference, as we are all one interacting, living being.
Dark and light, yes and no, birth and death: these are the dichotomies that form the balance of nature. It is through our experience of the continuity of the universe that we create time.
The process of my work reflects this idea of time as a compilation of moment upon moment that becomes the sum of my journey. The painted layers accumulate upon one another, and the revelation of the undercoat in the finished piece makes tangible the time and process of my labor.
The completion of each painting marks the entirety of its journey into being. Beginning a new painting means departing for a new destination, and so the cycle continues.
1967 Born in Vietnam
1989 BFA San Francisco Art Institute
1987 Schreiner College, Kerrville, Texas
2009 3 Person Show, Sandra Lee Gallery, San Francisco CA
2009 Selected Artist Permanent Collection San Jose Museum, CA
2008 Solo Show Evolving Art Gallery San Francisco, CA.
2000 Selected Permanent Collection San Jose Museum, CA
1997 Solo Show Monique Goldstrom Gallery New York, N.Y.
1996 “Double Visions” Art Commission Gallery. S. F. Ca.
1996 “An Ocean Apart” San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, Ca.
1996 “It’s World” Permanent collection San Jose Museum of Art.
1994 Two person show with Sandra Sunnyo Lee Mace Gallery. S. F.
1994 Vietnamese American “New Generation” Fullerton, ca.
1992 Solo show Foster Goldstrom New York, N.Y.
1991 Mezzanine Gallery, Scottsdale. AZ.
1991 Lower Gallery “The Horse in Western Art” group show with
Deborah Butterfild, Joseph Raffael and Susan Rothenberg
1991 Solo Exhibition “War” Foster Goldstrom gallery N.Y.
1991 Frankfurt art fair