New Personal work

I finally finished a personal piece this week! yay. Haven't done in a while, feels great! :D

SNAG @ the Cobalt, Vancouver Jan. 29

Since I was in Vancouver for a visit, Drew Young asked me to do SNAG last week with a group of artists including the awesome Katie So (who had just recently been feature on booooooom.com)
It was kind of crazy to do this the last night of my visit to Vancouver (I was waayyyy tired and groggy) But it was so nice to hand off my finished piece to the lovely lucky Lucy who won it! (horse theme for chinese new year :P)

(photo by Lucy)

Last penpal trade of 2013 Seoul // Chicago!!!! Happy 2014~

Heui and I decided to choose a poem and illustrate it for our last drawing swap of the year 2013

I just received Heui's AMAZING illustration in the mail a few days ago, set to Korean poet Yoon Dong-Ju 's poem:

Prologue

Let me have no shame
Under the heaven
Till I die

Even the sound of wind
Passing the leaves
Pained my heart
With a heart singing stars
I will love all dying things
And I must step my path
That's been given to me

Tonight also

The wind sweeps past among the stars

Heui's illo is a beautiful vision of a beautiful poem :)

 I chose a poem by Russian poet Anna Akhmatova:

Your lynx-eyes, Asia,
spy on my discontent;
they lure into the light
my buried self,
something the silence spawned,
no more to be endured
than the noon sun in Termez.
Pre-memory floods the mind
like molten lava on the sands...
as if I were drinking my own tears
from the cupped palms of a stranger's hands.
   -- 1945

I tried out painting on this thin sheet of birch wood

We both wrote our translated poems on the back of the artwork! (and they both seemed to be very emotional poems...ahaha)

2nd penpal drawing between Seoul // Chicago!

Heui and I both got each other's second assignments in the mail!

This theme was a portrait of our grandmothers. I think our relationship with our grandmother comes out through the way we approached the renditions.

Heui's grandma:

my grandma (I called her "婆婆" (po-po)):

She taught me how to fold origami and she used to make 饅頭 (mantou) or chinese steamed buns/bread a lot.

unhatching a new Penpal project..

My friend Heuiwon and I are starting a penpal (or maybe it's more like a paintpal) project! We still need to iron out the details but here's a look at our first project. We painted each other's portraits and then snail-mailed them to each other! We just received each other's pieces in the mail - now it's time to find a nice frame :D

Hoping to build this into an ongoing project so will post some updates on it as it develops :)

 Heui's portrait of me with cute cat ears ^_^

 a close up

Cats were surprisingly the theme since I also added Heui's cat, Haru, to her portrait:

Work from Robots & Monsters @AydenGallery

I found a shot of the gallery opening night below (my work is in the corner)! Too bad I could not make it but excited to see all the fun times. :)

Original photo and article by Aaron Morris found on grinddown.com

The two pieces in the show:

Coder, 18"x24" Ink + gouache on paper

Meigui, 18"x24" Ink+gouache on paper

USSAG: Erotic Friday 13th Opening

 Some people trying to figure my stuff out for me

that crazy lighting is from...

the disco floor!!

There were some mysterious masqueraders as well:

My lovely friend accompanying my lonely self to this show.

Afterwards, since it was 2nd Fridays (something similar to Vancouver's SWARM except more frequent! - all the local galleries open their doors to the public), we went to check out some other work being shown in neighboring galleries:

Very cool performance piece in the windows of ROOMS gallery:

(those are very uncanny stones they are playing with!)

summer painted fans

Earlier in the summer I painted these (Princess Mononoke inspired) fans for the Vancouver Chinatown Night Market but they ended up being too labor intensive and now I'm not quite sure what to do with them! I guess they will come in handy for the remaining hot days at the beach :)

"eyes of the tiger"

"still waters run deep"

SNAG 28 photos

Drew shot some awesome photos of the piece I did for SNAG 28 (on June 12). You can check out all the action for this night and previous SNAGs on the tumblr page or the Facebook page.

photos: Drew Young

Postcard Show Vol. II photos + SNAG tonight @9pm!

TONIGHT I'm doing SNAG again, come to the Cobalt on Main St. to see some live painting by other amazing artists as well. The lineup can be found on the facebook page.

Also the postcard show vol. 2 was a lot of fun. Saw some really awesome pieces as well as ran into some fantastic artists! I submitted the series below:

Some photos I snapped at the opening:

my buddies hangin out in the front window with all the other hip art

Some of my faves below:

 

Drew Young:

I loved this series by Shannon Elliott!!

 

SNAG + Burlesque night tomorrow!

I've decided to do a last minute SNAG appearance to say goodbye to Vancouver! If you're able to come out to the Cobalt, come say hello/goodbye and have a chance to take away some affordable Awesome-sauce art!

The piece from my first SNAG event, won by the Cobalt's very own DJ that night:

I dunno what I will paint this time...I guess you'll have to come and see, eh? (wink wink)!

The Postcard show tonight 7pm!!

Come by Ayden gallery to check out some awesome artwork via postcard medium! I will have 5 original paintings there!

Postcard Show facebook with info:
https://www.facebook.com/events/168740933290013/?fref=ts

ALSO if you stick around Chinatown you can come visit me and Ed at the night market on Keefer + Columbia! (only a few blocks away from Ayden!)