Where are you from?
It's complicated. The short answer is both not anywhere and everywhere. I was born in Nigeria, my parents are Chinese and English, though on this my father insists he is Cornish which means Celtic rather than Anglo-Saxon. After Nigeria, I then moved on living for various lengths of time in Ghana, England, Malawi, Australia and South Africa, where I am now based in Cape Town.
What does your name mean?
Eternal sensibility. My Chinese mother to chose my name. When I was young I thought it meant Internal Sensibility and duly related this to anyone who asked. I imagine people thinking that I was named after some wish on my parents part for a regularity of bowel movements but it was sensibility of the eternal kind that my mother was after.
Have you always wanted to be an artist?
I have always wanted to make art. However, making art and being an artist are two different things. But just as creativity has always been integral to the way I live my life, it has always been in my mind to become an artist.
When did you start making art?
When I was very young, I wasn't writing or speaking yet, and I'd get bored - as children do - and consequently insufferable to be with. My mother found the solution was to hand me a notepad and a pencil and say, Draw that! So drawing and creating have been part of my being from my earliest memories of myself. I'm not sure it could be called art, but it was a start of an awareness and the beginning of a lifelong apprenticeship.
What was your first drawing?
A horse's hoof. I say hoof but that was the bit of the horse I was closest to and drew particularly well. For years I thought the rest of the horse weirdly shaped until I realised that from my vantage point on the ground, looking up towards the belly of the beast, it was actually in proportion.
What is your art about?
For many years I really didn't know. It was about many different things depending on where I was in my life and in my thinking, on what I was reading and who I was spending time with. Over time, as one strips away the excess of thought, intellect and desire, the reason for making art as an individual becomes clearer, if not obvious. Much of my own personal journey has been spent on exploring belonging and its absence as a way of identity. Art was a way of defining myself in a landscape bereft of belonging. But it also evolved into a way of exploring the world around me, of interrogating and questioning the status quo and its validity as well as asking those great questions we all have of life. My own questions centred around identity, asking how we come to be in the absence of belonging? How do we define ourselves? Where do we belong, and if we cannot belong, what then? How do we get to be who we are? Today, my art is a visual record of the journey towards some kind of selfhood and presence, the experience of the human longing to arrive at one's self and one's place in the world. How do we get there? I don't know how it is for everyone but I do know that making art is part of a search..
What inspired you to become an artist?
My parents loved art and so I grew up in a house full of original art by good artists - and the thing was, in our family writers and artists were afforded the greatest of respect. So really I wanted to be both! I see now that both my parents were highly creative but never got to express their creativity. As a result they were very encouraging of my early, and later, efforts.
What advice would you give someone starting out in art?
Six words - explore, explore, explore. Question, question, question. It's the only way.
What inspires you now to keep on making art?
When I began, making art gave me a voice , a way to investigate the world and a sense of who I was and what I could become. Now, it is my contribution. But really, it's about the making...the act itself, the process, is the inspiration.