Eclipsed Interiority

This is one of the pieces I made for the Los Angeles series. I have been fortunate to live in numerous places in my adulthood, but Los Angeles is where I feel at home, in complete ease. Somehow I embrace the inherent contradiction living in the city like no others, and feel frictionless navigating between its perpetually beautiful and sunny days and people with arid darkness just underneath the surface. When I think of Los Angeles, the first thing that comes to mind is its mildness in temperature and softness in atmosphere. It's perpetually warm, wind is soft and breezy, temperature always just right. While certain sentimentality and loneliness are quite obvious in my works, I wanted to express the perceived lightness, delight, and perpetual nonchalant state at first glance when observing Los Angeles on its surface; simultaneously, I wanted the viewers to feel and imbibe the city's complexity and contradiction in a closer inspection. In order to create this work, I first glued several layers of paper on canvas, and peeled them off once the surface dried sufficiently which produced the textural element in this piece.