Story
Artist Statement
Over the past two years, metal, wood, lacquer, acrylic, and enamel have become my creative language. My relentless exploration of new material processes is not just a technical pursuit, but an expansion of my vocabulary. By weaving these materials together, I aim to speak through jewelry—to articulate emotions that often break the boundaries of spoken language.
I often grappled with doubt: Is this effort futile? Can others truly see "me" through a single piece of jewelry? I feared that the very breadth of my material exploration might dilute my identity, making my work unrecognizable. In this period of uncertainty, I pushed myself deeper into the essence of the materials. I refuse to be defined by a singular, flat style. A person’s identity is multifaceted and three-dimensional; even if the side shown to the world appears flat, it never represents the whole.
My jewelry must tell the truth, and the process of making gives me the courage to do so. To me, it is not essential that everyone immediately understands my work. It is like writing code: I know exactly what it does because I built the logic. I am not interested in defining or narrating my work for others; instead, I invite the viewer to learn my language to understand the piece. The meaning is not in my explanation—it is embedded in the object itself.
Making Statement
Pearls and enamel are fragile materials, much like the human eye. By stacking and compressing them, I create a sense of tension—materials bound and confined within a small metal platform. Through this process, I began to feel the unexpected hardness of their textures. This rigidity speaks to an emotion beyond the jewelry itself: a raw, vital, and untouchable directness. Consequently, in my later stages of making, I focused on preserving the unadulterated texture and color of the materials, free from human interference.
This perspective emerged from my experience making steel samples, which brought to mind a passage by Damian Skinner in Dead Souls: Desire and Memory in the Jewelry of Keith Lewis: “The historian’s job is not to find out what the maker was thinking at the time of making, but to look at the objects themselves and think about how they perform, and what they do in the world.” As time leaves its mark, my own marks of fabrication already tell a story. Any conceptual meaning I try to impose afterward feels redundant. For me, the "meaning" has been submerged by the story the object tells for itself. I don't need to say more; everything I wish to communicate is already present within the jewelry.
Skinner, Damian. "Dead Souls: Desire and Memory in the Jewelry of Keith Lewis." Keith Lewis, Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2023, p. 12.