Artist Statement of Aaron Fung
My art is painfully modern.
I seek to create in each work of art a dream catcher - haunted by the echo of the dream.
Why do I do this?
Must one justify everything? Dilettantes seek to judge and justify; artists know that the inspired act is justification enough, for art is a brutal dance, and a good dance sanctifies any cause.
Years ago I read Gogol's "The Portrait," about a painting whose eyes exerted a spell over all who looked upon it; I wished to create such works that exert a spell over the viewer - a painting of an inner scream, where the infinite soul stares out through alizarin glazes. And, like a totem of old, art exerts a spell and beholds the beholder.
My technique is the ossification of music; rhythm and melody frozen on canvas and clay. Like Schopenhauer I believe music, along with the other arts, provide us a glimpse beyond the illusion of phenomenal. But glimpse is not the right word, rather... feeling... intuition... For only in the arts, and especially in music, can one move beyond the Kantian prohibition of time, space, and causality and glimpse the neumenal world – my artistic process is the ossification of music.
My technique an open eyed meditation, a .quest without end; the journey itself is the treasure. When questing for the Holy Grail, the Arthurian knight began his journey alone, where the forest was thickest and darkest - where none had tread before; to tread in the path of another is dishonor: it is the knight's - the individual's - duty to find his own way through the dark.
I wander the depths, into the dark, and in this endless quest I seek to catch dream beyond the garish lights of day.
My materials are irrelevant verisimilitude: pastel, oil paint, charcoal, paper, pen, clay.
In seeking out the beautiful music in our lives we find within our tortured souls the artistic taming of the tragic. I am influenced by the tragic narrative of human history. Perhaps most of all, I am influenced by the faded memory born on the faces of humanity, of some ancient echo of the world beyond the illusion of corporeal phenomena.
My cultural influences include Kant's destruction of the theology and science. I am driven forward by Mephistopheles's opposition. In my work, I sought to ossify the music of, among others, Beethoven Mondshein Sonata, Mozart's Requiem, Chopin's Nocturnes, and Mussorgsky's Песни и пляски смерти.
If I wanted to make a political/social/etc statement, I'd have written an essay. The power of art is that it goes beyond such petty intellectual arguments and reaches to a deeper part of both the artist and the viewer. Is it any wonder Socrates sought to expel the artists from Kalipolis?
I care not a whit for my place in art history. We are living in a post world: post punk, post celebrity, post postmodern. All the rules and labels of the past have been effectively destroyed for the better, now it is time to salvage the corpse of the old world and begin anew. We all work within the shadow of the past, we can never escape the tradition of our ancestors. And yet, even given this looming shadow I cannot paint or draw like anyone else; the least original artists are the ones that try the hardest to be novel.
In my work I seek only one thing: to capture an echo of that beautiful dream image.
