I am an artist using animation as my art form. Through experiments in illustration, digital art and stop-motion animation during the past few years, I have attempted to study the world through stories and moving images.

Growing up in Taiwan, trained as a painter and immersed in traditional East Asian arts for over 20 years, I have a strong desire to retain handmade aesthetics while using modern digital filmmaking tools. This led me to work with various textures and drawn elements, to bring the spirit of shadow puppetry onto my stages. These experiments have resulted in my recent work “Hearth”, “The Tale of The Day”, and “Humanexus”.

My storytelling is inspired by Taoism, in which emptiness is the eternal reality. From this perspective, there is nothing from the beginning, and emotions and desires are transient. In “The Tale of The Day”, a demonic story adapted from a Chinese folk tale, human nature is epitomized with illusion. The plot is loose, and the time is vague.

Besides fictional animation, I also enjoy working intuitively and letting the process inspire the direction of a project, as though events and stories are like waves carried on water. My next project will involve the study of Wayang Kulit, and explore ways of bringing its beauty into making animation. Wayang Kulit is a highly developed shadow puppetry designated by UNESCO as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. To me, the grotesque forms of its puppets and the unique movement system create a great deal of possibilities for storytelling, as well as visualization in 2-D animation.

Being an independent animator, I see filmmaking as fine art in the traditional sense. The product is always a series of marks of expression, and the process is seeking originality and playfulness.