After spending three days with me, a close friend I hadn’t seen in years finally blurted out, half-joking but clearly unsettled: “Dude, you’ve changed. You’re weird. I’m leaving.”

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He wasn’t wrong. In the three years leading up to that moment, I had been training intensely in Zen practice and various martial arts while living on Oahu, Hawai‘i. Serious training accelerates change—not only physically, but psychologically. It reshapes how you move through the world, how you relate to others, and how you understand yourself.

 

By the time my friend visited, we had become unfamiliar to one another. To him, it may have felt as though I was an entirely different person. Upset, and wanting to release the tension of that moment, I used it as the premise for a body of work: Weird’s Around.

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Weird’s Around, my first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, opened with a reception on November 18, 2011.

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The exhibition consisted of roughly thirty illustrations constructed from layered construction paper, cut with X-Acto blades and assembled with wood glue. Through these works, I developed a visual language drawn from everyday figurative scenes—using them to examine my own struggles with introspection, vanity, and selfishness.

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One piece emerged from a personal realization: I have cousins who live on the East Coast. Over the course of a year, I missed all of their weddings because I chose instead to train full-time as a live-in student at a dojo in Hawai‘i. I wrote one cousin a letter wishing her well and enclosed a check to help with honeymoon expenses. A year later, I understood that the gesture wasn’t entirely for her—it was also for me. A kind of ‘get out of jail free card,’ meant to ease my own guilt for missing an important moment in her life.”