My work converges around Vermeer’s Paradox (2025), a sustained conceptual inquiry into memory’s fractures, the malleability of time, and narratives held in small, impossible images. At its core is a photograph—fictionally dated to 1815. In this imagined scene, two glass spheres inhabit a quiet, light-filled room—one hovering, one resting. On the floor lies a torn image of a Japanese warship, its hull bleeding into a white border. On the wall, like a somber Dutch history painting, hangs a battered Netherlands Indies stamp bearing the postmarks of Japanese occupation and, later, a symbol of Indonesian independence.
“This photo has since become the holy grail of temporal-displacement photography. One skeptical Dutch art historian pejoratively called it a ‘hallucinatory postcolonial afterimage,’ while others claim the photograph represents a space encoded with grief and intergenerational trauma. Others believe it is an archival phantasm, produced not by a photographer but by history itself—briefly coalescing into visibility before vanishing again. There was no explanation that was not extraordinary. These juxtapositions compress eras: past, present, and future collapse into a single painterly moment.”
Radiating from Vermeer’s Paradox are my painted stamp works—in watercolor, gouache, and oil—magnified overprinted and canceled colonial stamps. These works are not replicas but encounters with palimpsests of empire, occupation, revolution, identity, and erasure. Transparency meets opacity; fragility meets authority. Every smudge, overprint, or postmark becomes a residue of power, a trace of resistance.
My Dutch-Indonesian heritage undergirds this work: in one small stamp, entire regimes stake claims over language, territory, and memory. I paint to slow the glance, to coax out what might otherwise fade, and to invite viewers to linger in the slippages of time, power, and presence.