It is a dream come true for me, a native of Taiwan, to be able to create art in the United States. Even though my early life was very difficult, art was always my passion. I started my apprenticeship in oil painting when I was thirteen years old, and I've been devoted to art since then. I practiced Chinese calligraphy, engraved characters in stone for insignias, sketched, designed Chinese lanterns, and worked on intricate Chinese paper-cuttings. I was very lucky to have a cartoon published in Taiwan Magazine, 1985. I also designed several Chinese paper-cutting patterns for use in the local Taipei primary schools. All of these skills have been, and will continue to be, very useful to me in my career.

I have lived in the United States for more than eighteen years. Many opportunities surround me, and I feel I've already begun to take advantage of them. In Pittsburgh, I have participated in the Shadyside Arts Festival, where I sold my Chinese lanterns. The Community College of Allegheny County's school newspaper published a cartoon of mine. I have done illustrations for the Indo-Chinese Newsletter of the Catholic Charities' Refugee Service Program, and I have designed a cassette cover for a professional singer. I have taught Chinese craft and calligraphy classes for the Community College Continuing Education Program and at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. I participated in a faculty art show there, exhibiting my calligraphic artworks and drawings.

I feel very fortunate to have come this far. More than anything else, I'm very proud that I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991 with a B.A. in Design. I got a job at Carnegie Mellon right after I graduated, as a production designer, which began my graphic design career. I had worked for Carnegie Mellon as a Web editor and create online news and publications until June, 2004.

I'd taken a calligraphy class at Carnegie Mellon with well-known calligrapher Myrna Rosen. Over the years, I've fallen in love with calligraphy. I'd enrolled in my twenty-seventh semester of that class since 1990. I'd found that taking the same class over and over again after all these years have helped me develop my own unique style of making art.

In February of the year 2000, I kicked off my first art exhibit at the Carnegie Mellon University Center Art Gallery. The theme was called "One Picture is Worth More than A Thousand Words." I found Aesop's Fables, the legendary Greek literature dating from the 6th century B.C., to be a very good base for me to use in my calligraphic artworks. This show featured 20 pieces of both English and Chinese calligraphic artworks, each from a separate fable. The idea was to use "words" to construct a "picture."

Following my exhibit in the year 2000, I had my second art project displayed again at the Carnegie Mellon University Center Art Gallery in May 2001, called "Am I Who I am?" This show I included ten of my self-portraits as well as the other 20 pieces of calligraphic artworks by the request of the Center for the Arts in Society who had funded my show in that exhibit.

I use two layers for displaying my artwork, which is different from that of the typical oil painting. The front panel is acrylic and the back is gessoed board. On the front panel I used the spray paint technique to form my image and I oil painted the gesso board on the back panel.

I've chosen to do oil paint on gessoed board instead of canvas because I can, then, drill holes in it to hold the front acrylic panel together using wooden dowels. I've used my paper cutting skills to cut away paper protection accordingly on the acrylic panel and spray paint it, layer by layer, to get the ideal art effect I want. Therefore, the painting itself has a depth and it shows images overlapping each other. Through the acrylic panel, the gallery lighting casts shadow and creates a very dramatic affect. I'm attempting a man-made art effect, simulating images created using Adobe PhotoShop on a computer.

In the first show, I only used words to construct a picture according to each fable. I applied a different metaphor for each fable. Yet, in the following show, the only difference is that I replaced the front acrylic panel with a self-portrait instead of calligraphy, and, I used the same oil painting technique for the back panel.

I like to design my artwork in this unique style so that people can custom order it. Pieces have been custom ordered by the professors from both Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh and my co-workers.