My parents met in New York in 1980. Two Thai immigrants trying to find their footing in a country that wasn't built for them. I was born in Queens in 1984, and I spent my childhood moving — always the kid who didn't quite belong, always being reminded of the ways I was different.

I found drawing young. It was the one place nobody could tell me I didn't fit. I moved on to watercolors in high school and eventually enrolled at the Art Institute of Philadelphia in 2004. I didn't finish. I didn't have the discipline then, and I was honest enough with myself to know it. So I dropped out and joined the Marines instead.

I didn't fit in there either. But I served. Two combat tours — Iraq and Afghanistan. I came back carrying things I still haven't fully put down. Survivors guilt. Loss. The particular weight of being alive when others aren't.

After the Marines I built a life. Earned a bachelor's in English from East Stroudsburg University. Found a career. Forgot, for a long time, that I had ever been an artist.

In 2023 my father passed away from cancer. I had COVID when he was dying. I couldn't be in the room. I heard his last breath over the phone.

To survive the grief, I started painting. Oil this time. I didn't plan it — I just needed somewhere to put everything I was feeling and couldn't say. The canvas held it.

That's where this work comes from. Every painting carries that weight — the displacement, the combat, the loss, the years away from art, and the father I couldn't reach in time. It comes out in the boldness of the line. In the refusal to be quiet. In faces that hold their ground.

I paint Southeast Asian communities — their faces, their stories, their dignity. People whose lives are vivid and complex and still waiting for their place on gallery walls. I'm putting them there.

Pong Art is not a brand. It's a record.