My aim is to apply multiple art disciplines to reach outside the art world to facilitate local meetups and random conversations. Foo Dogs of North Shore is an interactive project centered around spontaneous touchpoints and little unplanned chats with dogs and dog owners that I happen to meet along my daily activities.
The main artwork I produce in this series is an immersive, mixed media collage installation, composed of photographs, found objects, and digital art. I convert the individual dog portraits into building blocks and arrange them to create a visual effect of a new compound image. To document the project’s progression, I am building personalized web pages that show the current position of the individual dog portraits in the larger artwork. The website component is dynamic: it reflects the shifting arrangements of the portraits as new dogs enroll in the project.
I started this artwork in 2025 during the dog days of summer. The name Foo Dogs of North Shore encapsulates the geographic area of my artist residency at AIR Studio in Glencoe, Illinois, where I had routinely run into friendly area dogs and first conceived of this project idea. The span of the dog participants has since grown from the North Shore community to other Chicago suburbs and city neighborhoods, as well as dogs from my travel destinations. The photos and tidbits I have collected chart a portrait of the in-person connections I encountered on my neighborhood walks, or while running an errand, shopping, or breaking for coffee.
Foo dogs are an expression of positive energy and good fortune, symbolism rooted in ancient Chinese Buddhism. They may also be referred to as guardian lions or guardian dogs and traditionally appear in pairs – a female and a male. According to feng shui, when facing a pair of foo dogs, on the left is the female dog holding a puppy, and on the right is the male dog which holds an iron ball. The female figure represents yin which symbolically protects the people inside the dwelling, while the male figure represents yang which protects the structure of the home. The ball and puppy symbolize the body and soul. By extention, the ball represents the physical world and the puppy represents the nurturing spirit.
Conceptually, foo dogs stand for the connectivity between body and mind, between the enclosed and the surrounds. They are an apt model for this collaged project. Throughout the working process, I randomly encounter faces and stories and set the individual snapshots alongside one another. They become interconnected elements that drive each other. Each part requires the other part to manifest the whole.
