Hello,

My name is Kai. Here I document my life through art. I’ve been painting since pre-K, all my life, on and off. Artmaking became a place of reflection and growth pretty early on. But also a retreat. Eventually I went on to go to art school (not for painting) and my previously melancholy motivation in art sky rocketed in my senior year. I took Experimental Drawing and understood myself outside of the context of my major. That was my first time having a fine arts course. I got back into painting and quickly oriented as an abstract artist. Now, though, I expand on that to fantastic nature with elements of abstraction.

As I settled more and more back into painting, I noticed what’s most important for me, like many artists, is the process: the painting coming together and my own thought trains. The more pieces I finished, the more objects I had that meant so much more than what they are. I started studying art history more, learning more about the lives of artists and I’ve been noting plenty notable similarities. I was agreeing with dead artists, some from the 1880s, some from 1999, all dead. The life’s work hangs on walls and we know all about their lives. “At this point in time, this was going on and I was thinking about this…”

The paintings are just the surface. The thoughts and input, the contributions to society art gives is incredibly invaluable. Entirely priceless when you know the context under which they’ve been created. The same goes for you, me, anything any of us created in our lives as well as our collective chronology. It’s priceless and becomes divine with context.

My context is not my name or my age or location. My ethnic background is important, sometimes, but largely not. But what is important to know is that it is a miracle I am alive. Every day that passes, I am thankful to be here painting. In comparison, my half brother has been hospitalized many times and is unable to care for himself from childhood trauma. He doesn’t have a mind of his own, much less a passion alongside a will to live. And neither did I, maybe one at a time. My life is a miracle. I finish paintings, is my context, and when I finish them, they have a life story, too. It’s that I hike, I feel whole, I connect with something bigger than myself. It’s that I have a relationship with nature that involves loving it with an undertone of feeling indebted to it. It’s that I love myself. I didn’t know I could do that. My childhood trauma survivors with complex-PTSD don’t end up as I did. And as much as I would like to keep my life, my art, and my childhood separate, they are very intertwined with one another contextually. This art is a celebration of life. Mine, yours, trees, who cares? It’s also a testimony to better being possible. That should be the perspective the art is viewed from.