We are immensely pleased to present The Lake, a new artwork created in response to Psalm 139, painted by Shawn Yu. This painting dives into a new theme – Water – for Summer 2012 with Spark and Echo Arts.

With a tension set between representational certainty and graphic overlay, Shawn intends his fantastic scenarios to be “read as both a visual game and a narrative.” Shawn’s visual and metaphorical language incorporates “Metallic Vessels” in each of his paintings along with stylized imagery and perspective.

A voracious reader of philosophy including Vladimir Nabokov, Baudrilliard, Roland Barthes, and Marshall McLuhan(media studies), Shawn notes that his favorite writer Nabokov’s novels “are usually a collage of different styles which probe into different points of view.” Shawn is inspired to paint using a “collage-like visual language that is a mix match of elements from different medias.” With each new painting his own vocabulary revolves, writing his own narrative with a story line woven through his current strokes of paint. Characters of steel teapots, knights, “skin gloves,” and faces posture in hidden, contained – or appear in a sliver of selectively revealed – compositions in oil. Shawn’s painterly response to Psalm 139 zooms into the individual experience, perhaps sublime and terrifyingly isolated in the vast sea of “the unknown,” while anchoring the comfort contained in those verses.