It's been about 7 months now, and I finally have my silkscreen studio up and running. It began last summer when Mikee built me an exposure unit and then a dark room. During that time I had my intern explore this DIY set-up; working out the kinks, developing a system within the process -- trying to make it essentially workable. And now, I can honestly say that it is.I did my first 4-color print a few days ago, based on a drawing that I was commissioned for by Soojin Buzelli, Creative Director, of Plansponsor and Planadviser magazines. It was for a column entitled, "Find the Best Provider."
In this case, the best provider is the best provider of meat-filled steamed buns.
Or as we say in Cantonese, cha-sui-bao.
I mentioned in a few posts that I have had a body of work floating in my head for several years now. It began when I was doing a 2 month summer fine art program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. The work that I was doing was homoerotic, but the motifs and imagery that kept surfacing during that time was rooted in food, and body image, beauty, race and (my) ethnicity.
I find it tremendously important to work on personal projects alongside commercial ones. For those of you who know me, you are probably tired of hearing me talk or write about it, but it's true. There is opportunity for the work that we do which nobody sees, those pictures that might be quantified by critics neither as fine art, nor illustration because it is less of this or more of that, less socially relevant and more decorative, less conceptual and more random; that work that we do in the privacy of whatever space we call our studios does carry with it meaning solely within that act-of-doing. So over a short period of three years, these random images, disparate from each other that I have done for no audience is finally taking shape. To be continued...
* The title of this post is from the lyrics of the song "One Thing," by Amerie.
