I’m a born and raised Québécois with a thoroughly Chinese name. If you find this contradictory or confusing, that’s fine by me and moi, et surtout moé.
Toronto is neither cheap, pretty or easy to get by in, but it’s the largest city in the best country in the world, eh?
Visually, it can be something of a mess. This makes it most photogenic for me.
MY ARTIST STATEMENT (because that’s a thing serious artists do, right? I mean, with ‘legacy media’ virtually gone and art criticism sleeping with the fishes, it’s now up to the artist to provide the paint-by-numbers critical lens that audiences and gatekeepers should see them through because who can be more eminently qualified to talk about one’s self than the self because hey, the self: it’s a knowable thing, isn’t it?)
In February 2022, I felt the impulse to capture the world as I saw it — before it could all go up in a mushroom cloud. What better way to do it than with a 35mm camera, eh? The biggest land war in Europe since World War II, a global pandemic with no end in sight, the all-round anger and rage that was fomenting for just about all humans alive today for legitimate reasons as well as entirely made up nonsense — this feeling that everything could come crashing down and destroy us physically and existentially, from within our nation-state borders as well as from without… a few years later, it’s good to know that all those anxieties were for nothing and that everything is tickety-boo.
What photography forced on me was to seize the moment by inhabiting it — at the push of a shutter button. This way of seeing became both soothing and intoxicating. I hope that this intoxication is passed on to you because it’s probably healthier and cheaper than other forms of getting buzzed, high, or drunk.
So what is my photography, and by extension my art, about? Because art always has to be *about* something, right? If it weren’t, how could any artist sell you their art while beating out their competition?
Despite photography being an art practice I stumbled into all of five minutes ago, I’ve been a professional artist in Toronto, Canada for nearly two decades in a non-visual field of art.
I’ve learned, after several years of doing what I’ve done and admittedly mostly failing at it (shocking, I know, seeing as how compliant and obedient I am to power and how I love to unquestioningly follow any and all industry trends, fashions, and unwritten, yet agreed-upon, practices and the latest discourse, replete with the head-scratching shibboleths that drive these), to never trust what an artist says about their art-making (and to trust myself even less when it comes to my own self-explaining).
But if you insist on trusting and believing what artists say about themselves, then you should also trust what car salespeople say about the cars they’re selling. Or me, about the used car I know you’d love to buy from me. Contact me for details and very special pricing.
I’ve also learned to never fully trust what a critic, gatekeeper, or worse — some internet influencer, has to say about photography. Because everyone’s right and wrong and everything in between, all at the same time — who can you trust to know and explain, for you, what any artist and any art is about? If you can’t trust the art-makers themselves, the so-called experts who function as art-making gatekeepers as well as paragons of good taste and style, then who can you believe? Who?
Keep yelling ‘who’ in confusion, frustration, and the cathartic thrill of yelling, for the sake of yelling, into an infinitely deep chasm — if doing this becomes addictive to you, then you’ll know — and have had explained to you — why I, WOO SEE-MING, am doing what I do and why I can’t help doing it.
(NOTE TO ALL YOUNGER ARTISTS: don’t write statements like this. They’re guaranteed to give no gatekeeper, anywhere, the warm and fuzzies which is, ultimately, what you know your art should be all about.)