The Freeway Became My Rice Paper

Interstate 5 in Los Angeles. The road I drove every day suddenly looked, one morning, like a landscape scroll.

Ink leaps and spatters, cutting the road open in a single bold gesture; soft gold and ochre hold the California afternoon light.

The freeway became my rice paper. Not for its shape, but for what it carried.

In this series, Interstate 5 becomes the central stroke of a contemporary landscape — one thick black line crossing the middle of the frame over pale yellow and dusty rose, with the mountains and trees on either side settling quietly into ink-wash. The painting is quiet, but it leaves behind a great many memories and stories. That Interstate 5 is, formally, the river in a landscape painting; and that my commute was really a song I wanted to sing to myself on a handscroll.

Painting in a new land

I came across the sea carrying brush and ink, and a tradition. Now that tradition is meeting the time of this place, and becoming a new language.

To paint the landscape of an unfamiliar land in a language of my own — for me, an immigrant, that was both an arrival and a consolation. It was a way of receiving the California in front of me through a language I had made my own.

In class I say this: the place you live is your own landscape. It is all right if you never paint the old mountains of Korea. The view outside your window, the road you drive each day — look at it through ink, and it becomes a painting, and a way of communing with the world.