Swimming in inspiration

Provided to China Daily

"When I start out with a specific intention," he says, "that's when a painting usually goes wrong. I can spend two or three years on a painting, so it takes passion for me to finish one."  

Window into a new kind of reality

High tea the Chinese way

Born in Bronxville, New York, Morabito is half-Chinese and spent his early years traveling between Hong Kong, where his family is from, and New York.

In 2006, he came back to Asia to study calligraphy and ink-wash painting in Seoul. Ink painting, he has found, really suits his stream-of-consciousness approach to his work - "though a figure almost always appears in it at some point. I don't always know who it is."

Morabito came to Beijing, which he calls "a place of cultural intrigue", in 2009 on a Red Gate Gallery residency.

"I spent time in my childhood in Chinatown in New York," he says. "Like most immigrant communities in New York, the culture is frozen in time while the home country changes."

He's been based here ever since, painting in his studio and teaching art in an exchange program.

"People consider some of my paintings horrific," he says, and he doesn't just mean the images of people eating live octopus. "But I don't consider them scary. I try to lead a drama-free life, but drama can come out in my work."