I believe that art must engage the audience like poetry does: by conveying a universal message in an image that is visually compelling.

Coming from an economics background, I feel strongly about making intelligent art that relates to issues that go beyond self-reflexive artistic concerns. My work touches on current themes such as globalization and immigration, as well as the more universal themes of mortality and what it means to be human.

As an artist, I started out as a carver of stone and wood at NY's Arts Students League, an institution that emphasized mastery of materials. I have since branched out into non-traditional materials, including appropriated images and text. The choice of media is usually inspired by the conceptual theme the piece addresses.

For example, "Made in China" relates to China's growing prominence in world trade, so I built a classical Chinese mountain out of common Chinese imports like semiconductors and cake toppers.

My latest attempt to make my work more accessible to the general public is a series of digital collages of my sculpture combined with photos of myself and appropriated images. In a cross-media loop, the viewer gets to experience the sculpture as an object in real space and then views the pictorial representation of that sculpture in a digitally altered photograph. The 2D images allow me to situate my sculpture in a fictional narrative that takes the place of the wall text that accompanies so much of contemporary art today.

Viewed together, the image and the sculpture should tell you better than I can, what my work is all about.