TRANSCRIPT
EDMOND: So Victor, today we’re so happy to have you here and look at your works. I’m so excited to see more works of yours. I think each work has its own profound meaning and extended thought. I remember the first time I saw you, you explained to me your piece “Pillowman”. With this one, you said that you want to express a phenomenon in modern society and the status of people’s minds where people don’t want to listen, or they don’t want to watch. That, or they only want to listen to what they want and watch what they want. So, would you please explain more how you feel about this and how you want to explain your works to people.
VICTOR: Okay, where do I fall into this. You know I’ve always thought about that and I want to avoid any kind of label. I don’t want to find myself going into—'Oh, you do impressionism’, ‘You do landscape art’. No. I don’t like labels. I—just, no. So, where do I fall in? Again, I understand that for marketing, yeah it’s this type of work. It’s you know, surrealism. I guess you could put it into that kind of category—surrealism because it’s dreamlike, it’s distorted reality. Yes, there’s sarcasm. Yes, they are politically motivated. Yes, they go into topics that deal with culture, deal with religion—you know, the sensitive areas that maybe the general public don’t like talking about but hey, I think we should talk about. There are conversations that I think need to be had, to be reinforced. History...
EDMOND: In our life as humans, we have negatives and positives, we have sunny days and we have cloudy days. You want to express something that is maybe a little negative, or darker but my understanding when I see your works—they touched me because different people understand your works in their own ways according to their experience, according to their knowledge, according to their background, according to their—at that moment—their emotion, and what they want to think of it. So that’s the point I want to say, your works could have a lot of understandings and expressions. From this point, negative or positive, it’s all good because we don’t see very many ugly things. We can just calm down—we can see it’s very calm, natural, wood, root, soil. And for this one, “Pillowman”, I chose this one to be part of this exhibition and it actually caught the eyes of many many people. So for me, I see long articles commenting on it, which, as an art gallery, is what we want because the art can draw the attention artistically or psychologically. This is what we really want. That is the main meaning of the art exhibition. For me, I like technically, skillfully, how it expressed calm, shadow, light, and human society—how it reflects a lot of things there.
VICTOR: I’ll use natural forms but I’ll distort, change them according to just how I like to see that as a form. Because if it doesn’t entertain me, I can’t see it entertaining you. I’m not interested in necessarily recreating a photo-realistic interpretation of reality. Like I have license, I gave myself permission to change reality to fit what I like to see. I’ll take what I see in a landscape and I’ll apply it and create—what you might say—my own world. And, as you were saying, yeah the works do have a negative vibe to them. In a lot of ways, "Pillowman" is like a series of work that I did that—it’s like a healing process for me. I have all this so called—maybe you want to call it anger, or frustration. Throw it into the art. Now that I’ve finished this group of work, am I the same person? No. It’s like a process of healing. Now I’m ready to do other things. So for future works, will they have that same type of bite or anger? No. Because I don’t think I have that anymore. Like I got it out of my system so it was a good healing process for me.
EDMOND: Can you tell us about your expectations coming in to this art exhibition?
VICTOR: My expectations? Oh wow. I think right now I kind of—my expectations have been sort of exceeded because I—you might say I’ve gone into a kind of hiding for the last few years, just to focus on the artwork. And now that I have a collection of work, and I feel like I’ve gone through the process of growth, like I was saying, and got all that nonsense out of my system, it’s now nicely framed and packaged so it’s not me anymore. So coming into this gallery and having yourself look at my work and showing such interest and coming to the opening and having people talk to me I go—"I’m not used to this, this is kind of—hey I’m liking this!" And then on top of that, you sent me that just wonderful write-up and I go “Wow.” That is—I’m very flattered, I’m so thankful, I really appreciate your support and your interest and that’s—that’s really nice. It’s flattering. I’m honored. And having this interview, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
EDMOND: Thanks for coming.
