Andrew Ooi

Andrew Ooi is a self-taught visual artist, based in Toronto, Canada. He creates sculptures and reliefs from paper developed from a long-time fascination with two-dimensional media considered in three-dimension. As a child he attended school at the citys Wards Island where he spent his public-transit commute folding discarded sections of the newspap... erexcept the Comics. Those he read through his teens, when for an independent study, he challenged himself to learn what goes into making a printed picture by attempting to copy a famous work by a great master. He chose not one, but two artistsAlbrecht Dürer and Katsushika Hokusaiexperimenting with cutting, carving and etching on various materials. Surprisingly, his discovery about his natural ability for accuracy was exceeded by the one of the drawn line. Without knowing how to render and incise it exactly on the matrix, the prepared surface for printing, any produced image would be devoid of representation. For him, line, like paper, was a three-dimensional application, and if manipulated by handpainted, cut, scored, foldedcould offer the extraordinary possibilities of transforming it into a shape, pattern and form. By 2015, he began to explore just that: lines organizing and obscuring perspective of unique artworks attracting audience attention. His works have been published by Bloomsbury, Rockport, Concordia University, UPPERCASE, Dolce and more; awarded multiple grants; and exhibited in Finland, Canada and across the US including Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington and New York. My art is about making sense of the world. It is about arranging the disparate shapes and elements I perceive environments, histories, geographies, art, artistry and human nature to be made up of into tangible systems and forms. It is about occupying these realities, ideas and interests in feeling and being, to allow meaning and its significance in the long view, to develop measuredly. The gradual understanding is determined through an unconventional approach of ...Read More