About Pei

I was fortunate enough to have had a very multicultural upbringing and many diverse experiences in my young life. I was born in Taiwan and raised on the Navajo Nation in Arizona as part of a biracial household. As a child, I spent summers enduring the monsoons of the tropics and running around barefoot in the desserts of the southwest. As I grew older, I was able to take part in academic programs in the northeast and abroad.

It is perhaps because of these varied experiences that I am plagued by an insatiable wanderlust. I had a passport and took my first cross-oceanic flight by the time I was 10 months old. I have visited and photographed in 20 countries and still feel like I’m just getting started.

Photography is my way of bringing the world home with me.

Gear

I shoot primarily with a Nikon D700 and have an arsenal of lenses to accompany it. The lenses I carry with me most often are the 50mm 1.4, the 105mm micro, and the 14-24mm 2.8. I do 99% of my post-processing with Lightroom3 and the remaining 1% in Photoshop CS5.

Why Penelope’s Loom?

The name Penelope’s Loom is derived from Homer’s Odyssey. In the story, Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, staves off the advances of hopeful suitors by telling them that she will choose one to marry as soon as she finishes weaving a burial shroud for her ailing father-in-law, Laertes. She spends each day at her loom weaving and at night, she returns to undo what she has done during the day so that she never completes her project.

To me, Penelope’s process of creating, unraveling, and then re-creating distills the essence of the artistic process. As artists, we are constantly creating work, examining and deconstructing our creations, and then creating more based on what we’ve learned. The artistic process is ever-evolving and never complete.

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