Eric Tai
2023 Spring Session II
Eric Tai’s art examines this period of time as an in-between space where imagination leads to reality, memories take shape to retell stories of the past, and life is the beauty between birth and death. Here, art is not merely material or content. It is the experience of beauty found in the mundane. His contemplative paintings invite viewers to continue the meditative, worshipful postures he’s begun through the moving of material on surface. The textures found in his paintings and drawings evoke landscapes from both the ethereal and the chaotic abyss. In essence, his art is an attempt at transcendence from the immanent frame beyond the self or the material, so that through means of making and experiencing, one may be tethered to the other.
He is interested in exploring the chaotic tensions that exist in our universe. We are simply treading terrains of malfunction and chaos while understanding that there are microscopic bonds that hold the universe together in the political, social, physical, metaphysical, and economic spheres. He has come to embrace the chaos and unexpected outcomes, all while looking for beauty that exists in the broken, chaotic slurry. Ideas of the sublime are almost always reoccurring in the narrative of his work, as he struggles with the natures of life, death, beauty, and grotesque.