I often seek out individuals whose temperaments match my highly mannered style. That’s why I portrayed the Chinese Shaolin kung fu master Sifu Shi Yan Ming. I took numerous snapshots of him in his temple in New York, which I later turned into paintings. His intensity perfectly complemented my dynamic brushwork. I tried to depict the raw, concentrated energy of this warrior monk. The ferocity of his movements and facial expressions is contained within the tight format, but at the same time bursting out of it.

Given my passion for all things expressive, it was inevitable that I would eventually also portray a ballet dancer. Dancers are the ultimate physical storytellers. Ballet is characterized by precision and technique. In my ballet series, however, the objective was never to skillfully render feats of skill. What attracted me to this artform was not its methodic rigor or struggle for virtuosity but its flamboyance, stylization and its unabashed and overblown emotionalism. These qualities, of course, are all too present in my art. Because of this shared vocabulary, it was not too difficult for me to understand the impassioned paralanguage of ballet and to reinterpret it in my own twisted visual vernacular. My process unfolded as follows: I began with contours. I went with the flow and mimicked the refinement of my model’s gestures with delicate, harmonious lines of the brush. I then dramatized the subtleties of her hands and facial expressions with flashier, more powerful strokes, mixing elegance with exaggeration. Finally, I went for total contrast, counterpointing all melodic movements with thick, wild splatters and splashes. I felt genuinely touched by ballet’s ethereal grace, but I was not, in the end, going to allow my brush to dance to any tune other than the one in my own head.