Catherine
Lecce-Chong

I often mix a diversity of cultural or racial images, languages, and ideas. My life experience has been full of diversity and inclusion, therefore, I cannot create with a limited palette of philosophy or small mindedness. As a global artist, I am a witness and a journalist.

I see life and art through a lens of complexity, fear and hope. Hope and its uncertainty guide me to make portrait icons to contemplate and to report the dangers and impermanence of life and environment.

Yet I make simple, figurative, folk-like and story-like images. I paint with bold textured colors in the underpaintings. Then I mute these artworks with many transparent white glazes.

I create drawings and sculptures that are translucent and fragile. Light is a crucial ingredient to design my creations, but it also causes some of my blindness and pain.

I create my art in different kinds of light. This is because of my aesthetic interest, its symbolism, and to adjust to my visual impairment. For example, I use many lamps, lanterns, flashlights, little lights on my gloves, or candle light.

I am not concerned with archival durability with my fragile work addressing tragedies in this transient world. My art can dissolve or change with patches, edits, and transformations by involving people to work with me.

I admire manuscripts, scriptures, and books. There are tactile letters, numbers or braille embedded in my work.

Because I am also a meditation teacher, I often include hidden writings of meditations or quotes in my artwork.