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Quietly pacing back and forth between sleep,
wakefulness and the mood of my paintings
It often happens that I remember the scenes from my dreams when I wake up in the morning. It seems as if I can still smell the scent in the air or hear some noises whispering in my ears. Everything feels so real: these are things or objects that go even beyond reason, familiar in a way, yet unknown in others. The time and space of the stories I experience are often carried out in different dimensions. All I see appears in front of my eyes so vividly, yet it is somehow the fruit of my imagination… I always feel these images are like an unexposed roll film, at times broken apart, at times interconnected. In the fast flashing lights, everything leaves the trace of an image in the retina and a fleeting memory within my heart, so that its existence becomes at times uncertain.
I like to portray nature and people associated with it. Nature is a projection of an ideal reality. It is always a good way to relax whether it is in a dream or in the real life. When the outline of things that should have been clear in life is gradually being disturbed by many distracting thoughts, walking in nature is a good way to make those odd and bewildering pieces of thread find a new order by following the ridge line of the mountain which stretches before us from left to right. This is why I like mountains. I also like the sea. The waves crushing onto the shore are both fluctuating and eternal. All vexations follow the waves and are washed away just like the grains of the sand. The breathing also follows the beat of the waves and tends to be calm, like the thin, dilute pigments in the paintings. The toner mixed with water flows through the layers in a regular pattern of dryness one on top of the other emanating a dense and thick fragrance just like the ocean does. Both the ocean and the mountains have a very strong life element in them. I was attracted by their fine magnetic particles, and with gratefulness in my heart I returned in the embrace of a natural frequency.
We all heard the sound of the pebbles being beaten and rolled into the sea waves, or seen floating foam forming and disappearing with waves, or smelled the morning air characterized by fresh mud and the scent of vegetation, the falling dewdrops reflecting the world. These are natural landscapes we have all come into contact with. I hope I can describe all these feelings, so that they are not just a fleeting memory in the realm of the senses. There are so many memorable things in life: maybe it's just a rekindling emotion, an innate jealousy between brothers and sisters, an innermost feeling of a silent night of love, a sudden and disturbing thought in the heart… These memories are maybe the proof that we existed in this world. In a personal and individual way, we all hope to resonate with other people in this world. In everyday life, there are still many feelings that are hard to explain. I do not want to overindulge in the catharsis of these senses. I hope this kind of emotion is a deeper and more restrained expression, and as a result, most of the characters in my work are often portrayed without obvious emotions or in overtly dynamic postures. They are not hollow expressions but simply an invitation to explore their inner world.
One day, my friend sent me a book. I read the words on the folio. It was a collection of Polaroid photography by a Russian film director. He captured the evanescent day-to-day life with his camera with his extraordinary visual narrative technique. Some of the photos in the book were simply accompanied by a text, just some observations and some notes. I really like this kind of booklet: there is a feeling of mutual understanding between images and text. If these two were separate, maybe we would feel they are no longer correlated. However, placing them together can easily touch our imagination. Text and images are like the branches of a big tree. The process of reading is like the morning light which follows the veins on the tops of trees. Although they follow different patterns, they will eventually converge in the trunk of the tree. When admiring the picture in a book is like embarking on a trip which has nothing to do with us, but at the same we feel attracted by it as if it were a part of our lives, just like a dream. In real life, we often follow the thoughts of others to deduce the antecedents and consequences create different imaginations through different experiences, let individual emotional experiences respond to them through various media, and create different thinking universes all the time. Observing this phenomenon is something that I have long been interested in.
In this exhibition, my works are group paintings composed of two to three canvas frames. The images are drawn from magazines, the Internet or film and television, just as if they were dream scenes. At some point, they are cut off. The condensed image is a temporary connection between the past and the future, a presage of the occurrence of the event. The paintings are linked by their respective space-time backgrounds and perspectives of looking at the world from a different angle. Everyday sight is transformed into new fragments. They are like a stream of dreams. They are given a personal variable and become another dimension. There is no continuation of time and space. The viewer interprets the work along the lines provided by the screen. Emotional experience also creates the soul of the work. The visual flow between the works finally enters the inner world of the viewer and interacts with it. The figures, expressions, gestures, scenes, or patch geometry, etc., depicted in my work, although they seem to carry strong hints and narratives, are merely guides to enter the picture and project the medium of the story. There will never solely one screenplay, just like the reality we face will not be only one, but perhaps the reality we think of may only be a long dream, a dream that we still cannot awaken from.
