Shanghai Salad

The painting is sort of an "alchemical transmutation" of the orgy of bowel burning red I suffered through in Shanghai. The shrimps and cabbage leaves have turned into women, and crimson broth into putrid shades of chartreuse and fluorescent green. From a soup to a salad, that incidentally evokes my memory of the strange and colorful building that I could view from my hotel window at night.

This is a painting that I began at home in San Francisco, continued while in Shanghai, and eventually finished (or abandoned?) after I returned to the US. The painting is reminiscent in style to the Contraband series of collages made in 2017. They come from a cathartic method of making collages simply by ripping up old magazines (no scissors) and binding all the scraps together in acrylic medium, (or something called "Hodge Podge" - a sort of glue).