I met Dr. Michelle Lewis-King 王米雪 — artist, sound artist and Chinese-medicine scholar — at Tyler School of Art in 1992; she had graduated in sculpture the year before, I had just enrolled in painting. She began working with me conceptually then, and helped me realise my graduate exhibition at Temple in 1994. We lost contact for fifteen years — the years I spent alone inside the digital work, building an inchoate boîte-en-valise that led, in the end, to a creative impasse.

Our reunion in 2010 broke it open. Michelle insisted that I paint again, exhibit again, and output the select digital prints I had kept to myself; she gave the practice a new direction and, with it, a new purpose. Her thinking has been present in everything since, including the recent work in China.

The friendship is grounded in the humanities — in art and technology above all — and in a shared, if differently held, attention to Jarry and 'pataphysics. It is a common ground Michelle occupies more critically than I do, alert to the limitations of the modernist, and largely male, avant-garde from which it descends. Sculpture and sound, her own fields of mastery, are where her hand is most direct; the deeper debt is to the building of ideas before they become objects. Where her contribution rises to collaboration, it is credited on the works themselves.