Helen Cahng

During a recent trip to Los Angeles, I experienced a feeling of déja-vu. I reflected back to the last time I was there when I realized there had never been a last time. What I was remembering was a collection of memories accumulated from a lifetime of mass media stimulation, which I'd adopted as part of my own history. Through print, film, television and radio, I had experienced Hollywood without ever having been there.

To me, art is not merely academic, but also includes the signs, sounds and symbols that accompany daily life. Mass media has become an influential part of our collective memory. I create self portraiture not with a believable physical likeness, but rather with symbols and text taken from popular culture that contain personal significance. As familiar images, they create both associative and inherent responses from the viewer. Through this process, my work examines relationships between contrasting ideas; word and image, overt and subliminal, applied and inherent meaning in symbols, and real and imagined experience. Because they are easily reproduced and distributed, works on paper lend themselves readily to this idea.