About this series
There are few questions in the minds of refugees as they prepare to leave their homeland, beyond Where will we go? and How will we get there?

If they were to ask, for example, How will we get by in this new place? Will our children still know our language and culture? How will this change affect our family? Will I see my sisters and brothers again? How will our children learn our ways? I wonder, would they have continued on their journeys?

Such questions were not immediately pertinent to my parents. But these questions are asked at some point. And in the constant negotiation of language, nationality, culture, values, and sense of self that has been my identity, there is an opportunity to answer and to wonder.

We're Here is a about identity.

In this body of work I depart from my usual style of figurative work and portraiture to experiment with the instability of my subjects' identities. Much of this experimentation involves literalizing the abstract. For example, in my series Identification, I transferred xerographic images of a literal identification photo to rice paper in order to ponder questions of what information gets translated and what does not. In my piece Cousins' Picnic, Garden City, KS, I literally extract the figures from one place and context -- meal time for me and my cousins in my uncle's backyard in Kansas -- to a lush seaside landscape.

We're Here is also a realization, as is shown in the bewildered looks of my subjects in their barren landscape in the title piece, We're Here.

Finally, We're Here is an affirmation. In the context of this xenophobic time in America, with the constant surveillance and profiling of immigrants, and of the mass displacement of people in this current war without end, We're Here is also my way of telling a personal story about a displaced people trying to find a place.