joSon was born in the Philippines to a Filipino-Chinese mother and an African-American father. At the age of ten, he was sent to live with his mother’s family in Vietnam, where he was educated in a Buddhist temple throughout his teen years in preparation for becoming a monk. “I thought that was my calling long before I saw life through the viewfinder,” joSon continues, “…but the truth is, I have never left the monkhood. I just left the temple." You can see that very clearly in his work today in a landscape, a portrait of a child or a still life of a flower – meditations on the beauty to be found in the simplest of forms.
