China Town is a small collection of works created shortly after my arrival in New York, in the full excitement of discovering a new, mesmerizing, and vibrant city.

Living in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I walked every day through Chinatown with my camera, searching for compelling faces, gestures, lights, and fragments of urban life. Those photographs later became the raw material for my compositions and portraits.

This was a decisive moment. My style was leaving its incubation phase and beginning to assume a clearer, more personal identity. The energy of the streets — dense, chaotic, magnetic — entered the canvases and helped define a language that was finally becoming my own.