"Life is a box of chocolates You never know what you're gonna get." Forrest Gump

While Forrest Gump is a wonderful and inspiring movie, it is just that… a movie! And chocolates tend to be too sweet, as Hollywood's interpretations generally are. In reality, most people face life and is challenged by a complexity that is much more than a box of chocolates. Here, I propose that life is more like a jigsaw puzzle. While one tries to put the puzzle together, it tends to be an elusive process, where some of the pieces don't quite fit into place and others are completely missing.

In this series, Has it…?, I've painted together multiple images (generally four) into one big puzzle. In some places, where the pieces are from the various images, the results are surprising. In other places, where pieces from the same image come together, the audience is clued to what is really being depicted. For me, "it" has started out to be about technology. Yet, realizing that "it" cannot be so limiting and restricted, the term has shifted as the series progressed to include sex, religion, politics, and anything that one wants "it" to be. For each individual, putting the puzzle together is a quite unique process from the next.

In most cases, the images have little common subject matter, except that for me, they somehow fit with the title in mind. The direct influence of John Baldassari's idea of the blasted allegory: "while something is happening here, something is happening there," Has it…? is breaking away from the general tradition of painting single images. This is not to say that the painting of multiple images on one canvas have not been done before. In fact, Rosenquist and Rauschenberg are just a couple names that quickly come to mind as multi-layered image makers. And the use of montage and collage is quite common by an eclectic number of artists from various backgrounds and schools.

Yet, Has it…? is a challenge to the audience to reconstruct what has been deconstructed and presented forth, to fit one's parameters for the puzzle. In an age of so many "posts": post-millennium, postmodernism, post-colonialism, post-multiculterialism, and even post-postmodernism, there is such diversity and countless numbers of interpretation. Yet, each interpretation is distinctive and is one's own solution to the conundrum as well as to the questions of "life."