Swimming in inspiration

Provided to China Daily

Take that fish, a painting he says was triggered by his sick pet fish, Edward. ("All of my pets are named for English royalty," he says.) In a deadpan voice, he describes how he almost lost Edward down the drain once, how he almost drank him from a water bottle and how his finned friend ultimately committed suicide. ("Who could blame him?" someone mumbles behind us.)

Window into a new kind of reality

High tea the Chinese way

The fish in the painting, however, is no emaciated pet. In fact, it looks big and delicious - lunch for 50 of your best friends.

"I like to paint what people eat," Morabito says, perhaps coincidentally, as he launches a slide show of his recent work. The audience inhales as a unit when the first picture appears: Korean people eating live octopus.

The scene employs one of the artist's favorite motifs, the cityscape, though he cautions against trying to read too much reality into these paintings. Even the Korean fish market, he says, is an amalgam of more than one urban environment.

The title of the exhibition, Morabito says, is taken from the book Catching the Big Fish, in which David Lynch writes: "Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're very beautiful."

Milking the metaphor a bit, the artist says rather than looking for ideas, he prefers to look for "bait for an idea".