Mother/Father Piece

This blog was started to document the progression of the art project "Our House," but having gotten into the spirit of blogging, I feel that this is an excellent way to record my overall artistic progress and development, and also a good way to reposit any major ideas and inspiration relevant to all my ongoing projects--not just "Our House."

So to make this blog more complete, I will enter a few “retro-posts”--posts that refer to a few important points in time that happened before the beginning of the blog.

This particular post refers to the above piece of my mother and father (3x6 feet, done in early November this year). The working title of the photograph is “My father left us for greener pastures, fresher faces, and a new family. Forty years later, mom met him again at a convalescent home… I felt a light, and it opened me.”

The title is long, but I felt it had to be so because the photograph will have more impact if the backstory is somehow conveyed to the viewer: When I was child, my father was a successful and thriving businessman in Malaysia. In the Chinese culture of the time, it is common for successful men to have mistresses on the side. And when I was six, for whatever reasons known only to him, he decided to leave our family to pursue a larger business empire, a younger wife, and a new family.

Anyways, to make a long story short, about forty years later my dad was put into a convalescent home by his latest family. We got a call informing us of his whereabouts. So my mother, my sister, and I went to visit him. This is a picture of their first meeting in forty years.”

When I was there, there was an opening of light, an opening of enlightenment in me. It was a special moment in my life and, I’m sure, in my mother’s as well.