welcome to my new site: starlit flashes. flashes of beauty, truth and inspiration... found in the mundanity of daily life. share in my vision, and hopefully you will leave inspired and refreshed, and with a renewed vision of your own.

theme
"starlit flashes" is a phrase that i created for my journal when i revamped it a few months ago. with the rebirth of my homepage, i made it the overarching theme for the entire site. i've always loved stars, and "flashes" to me communicates an almost divine revelation of the sublime.

"beauty, truth and inspiration" are three words that i feel sum up my life philosophy. i'm an aesthete through and through. i used this phrase to describe my website when i joined the asian journalist webring, and i thought it fitting for this new site. i designated a part of the phrase to each of my three main sections:

beauty: my online journal. i search for beauty, i strive to surround myself with beauty, i experience beauty in everyday life. updated frequently, though not always daily.

truth: information about this page and coming soon -- about me .

inspiration: my friends, both online and rl (real life. but only the ones that have homepages. i'll be adding to this list). i would be lost without them.

history
my homepage was born in january 1996, during my freshman year at stanford. since then, it has greatly evolved, but has never undergone a major overhaul. i've been meaning to totally revamp it for a few years now, but somehow i never got around to doing it... mostly because i had so many ideas cluttering my mind that i couldn't find the motivation or inspiration to create order out of the inchoate mass of possible themes, images, and color schemes that ran rampant through my head for so many years.

my former homepage had become a sort of frankenstein's monster -- it had grown into an out-of-control beast, with sections that started out small, but over the years, grew in such a haphazard manner that they became incohesive and incoherent. my photo gallery, for example, was swollen with dozens of photos that were slapped together on a single page, not particularly organized except in a loose chronological order.

i tossed around ideas of deleting sections or rearranging pages, but eventually, i decided to start from scratch. never mind all the cool whiz-bang gizmos and cutting-edge web advances i saw on other people's pages. i sought a stripped-down approach, one that would cast aside as much frill and superfluous extras as possible. my new homepage was to embody minimalism; embrace simplicity.

philosophy
to me, simplicity is beauty. i firmly believe that simplicity can encompass complexity and gift it with a pureness of line that is far more stunning than any overwrought convolution. nature exemplifies the phenomenon of complex simplicity in all of God's creation. even the simplest organism, such as the paramecium, displays a miraculous complexity within single-cell simplicity. within this site, i strive to emulate and seek after the breathtaking beauty found in nature. and what better emblem to symbolize the depthless wonder of nature than the moonlit sea.

graphics
the graphics contained within these pages were created by mc of the archangel chronicles. i would like to thank him for the time and effort and inspiration that he poured into this project -- he took the unarticulated vision in my head and created something even more visually stunning than i had imagined.

when i gaze upon the main graphic, i am captivated by the serene glow of the moonlight quietly reflecting upon the water. the hazy diffusion of celestial light lends a dreamlike air to the scene. i feel that this image communicates nature's paradoxical "complex simplicity" -- with the plethora of diverse elements working together in glorious harmony. the scene transports me to a place where the nights are as starry, the oceans as shimmery, the moonlight as bright and dreamy as in the image. the fantastical element retains just enough realism to create a profound impact on the viewer.

read the artist's commentary on the creation of the starlit flashes image.

once again -- welcome, and may your journeys be graced with beauty.

/back to top/