Copyright by Lei Zhang Shanbhag

ARTIST STATEMENT

2008

I try to examine the relationship between symbol and content. The content has much more information than the symbol; whereas the symbol could not fully or even partially represent the content.  I am questioning the validly of the inferred from the observed. It is my attempt to demonstrate, in the information age, how distance influences and contributes to the contents.

 I enlarged popular emoticons by a factor of several thousand until each pixel is clear in size and then copied the scaled-up image on to the canvas. Then I painted on the grid surface.

In photography version, I photomontage the paintings as the background, along with a number of other images as texture, and created a more enriched virtual world than the original paintings.