The Method Artist: Pho's Light From The Void

By @JustinWetch

When Pho was eight or nine, shadow figures started visiting him at night. Sleep paralysis would pin him to the bed while dark shapes gathered at the edges of his room. Sometimes a glowing silhouette appeared among them. His religious parents had an explanation: "That's the good one. Follow that one."

He didn't know what to do with that information. He was a kid in a rough neighborhood who moved constantly, who would later try physics as a safe route and drop out, who would play in bands and design his own cover art and imagine a life of concerts and records. But the image stayed with him, darkness with something luminous inside it, a figure you couldn't quite see standing against a void you couldn't quite escape.

He wouldn't make art for another decade. But he'd already seen it.

The name came later, in college. He'd just lost two close friends. The grief had flattened him, left him questioning everything. He was flipping through a physics textbook, looking for something to call himself, something that wasn't the person he'd been before.

The word "photon" caught his eye. A light particle. He paired it with "tide," a wave. A light wave. "Essentially me wanting to step out of the darkness I felt I was in."

Before that reinvention, he'd been born in Mexico, moved to the US at four, bounced between cities through his teens. He enrolled as a physics major with an astronomy minor because math came easy and the universe fascinated him. It lasted a year, maybe two. Music had been the real dream since he was ten. He taught himself guitar, piano, drums. He played shows, designed his own cover art, pictured his future on stages.

Then COVID killed live performance. A friend handed him a cracked copy of Photoshop. And something clicked that had never clicked with music.

"I love music so much, but I can't sing," Pho says. "I don't have the voice to propel what I'm feeling to its fullest extent."

He'd spent years trying to express something he could see in his mind's eye but couldn't translate through sound. With visual art, the barrier vanished. He could finally render the images that had been living in his head since childhood, the shadows and the light, the figures in the void.

He locked in. For five or six years now, he's made something almost every day. No formal training, no art school. Just obsessive experimentation with whatever tools he could access, starting with phone apps and bootleg software, eventually building a proper workspace: an L-desk with a printer and scanner on one side, computer and iPad on the other, a cutting mat for physical collage, and a small analog CRT TV he drags over when he wants authentic glitch distortion.

He describes it like a mad scientist's lab. Music blasting through headphones, anything from metal to jazz to drum and bass, whatever makes him feel something. Images cycling between computer and printer and scanner and back to computer. Print something, cut it, scan it, manipulate it digitally, print it again. "Completely hectic," he says. "Like a madman working in a dungeon."

For a stretch, Pho kept a dream journal. He'd wake at 4 AM and scribble a single word or phrase, just enough to reconstruct the full dream later. "Doorknob disappears." "UFO ship." He was reading Carl Jung obsessively, trying to decode his own subconscious. He named one of his pieces after a Jung book: Modern Man in Search of His Soul.

The practice worked too well. He started lucid dreaming constantly, recording multiple dreams per night, never fully resting. The line between waking and sleeping blurred. "I was starting to lose my shit," he says, laughing. "So I had to stop."

He's returned to it since, more gently. But that period of mining his unconscious produced some of his most psychologically charged work, pieces he didn't fully understand until months after making them. Every time he sits down to create, he says, he's having a conversation with himself, with his higher self or his subconscious, whatever you want to call it. The art comes before the understanding.

One story explains a lot.

As a teenager, alone in his house near a forest, Pho took something psychedelic. He went outside, came back, tried to sleep. What happened next blurred the line between dream and hallucination. "I remember getting up out of bed, and outside I could see a bunch of shadow creatures-looking things." It felt like the realest dream he'd ever had. He doesn't know if he actually fell asleep. He woke up in his bed with no memory of how he got there.

The experience was terrifying. It was also, he says, necessary. "Sometimes in life you need something to tell you that you're not invincible."

Here's the reveal: he suspects that trip is where his signature came from. The shadow silhouette that appears in piece after piece, that dark featureless human figure standing against vast landscapes or swirling voids, was born from something that scared him. The shape that haunted him became his visual language.

"It's more like putting the human experience inside the work," he explains. The silhouette is deliberately blank. No race, no gender, no identifying features. Anyone can project themselves into it. When he puts that figure in a scene, he feels like he's in there. And when viewers see it, it allows them to put themselves in there too.

Pho borrowed the term from acting. A method artist, in his definition, makes nothing that isn't drawn from genuine emotion. Something lived, experienced, felt.

His dissociation pieces come from actual dissociation, a feeling he's known his whole life, the sensation of watching yourself from third person. His Sisyphus piece comes from understanding the daily boulder. "You have to imagine Sisyphus happy," he says, reaching for Camus without prompting.

When he works, there's no audience in the room. "There is only me and what I'm working on." No fear of vulnerability, no fear of messing up. Just whatever is true. Once the work is released, he loves hearing how people interpret it, the meanings they find that he didn't consciously put there. But during creation, it's a private conversation.

The textures layered over his digital work, canvas grain, gesso, film noise, aren't about making it look physical. They're about finding the right feeling. The motion blur comes from studying Francis Bacon's smeared figures. The psychedelic waves come from Op Art and Pink Floyd and Tame Impala. Every technique traces back to an obsession or an experience.

He's still drawn to the spiral, a shape he doodled in school notebooks years before he considered himself an artist. Rebirth, the void, cycles. "All the subjects I tackled, in the most simplified form." He expects to work on spiral pieces for the rest of his life. It comes and goes. He'll make three or four pieces with spirals and silhouettes, then it fades, then it returns. A recurring symbol he'll probably never finish with.

Pho shouts out collectors who believed in him: @Willep333, who helped set up New York shows; @Vince_Van_Dough, tied for owning the most of his one-of-ones; @droidfame, @hittmannyc (who collected his Sisyphus piece), @CyborgNomad (Icarus), and @WAPSHOP_ETH (Broken Promises).

Artists inspiring him lately: @0xTjo ("that dude's work is always very impressive"), @briscoepark ("his photographs are very unique, very haunting, that's my bread and butter"), and @deltasauce ("that dude's grind is non-stop").

For future Weekly Dose episodes, Pho recommends @arrogantkei, @elfilter_a, and @outrunyouth.

What does he wish people understood about his work? He couldn't think of anything. He doesn't make art to be understood. The work is personal to him, and he doesn't question what people think of it. If it resonates, it resonates. The shadow silhouette is there if you want to step inside.