I find it difficult to summarize what I am painting, just like I would fall silent if you ask me to describe myself in one sentence. What I can say is that I paint because I do not know myself, yet I long to know myself, the things I encounter, and the world I inhabit. The human eye can never see a complete self, so we need a mirror. Painting is my mirror.
I have to confess, no obvious continuity exists in my current body of work. At times, I am drawn to ancient cave paintings. I try to create my own “cave” by combining printmaking and painting, recording the traces left by the force of life in the present moment. The smoothness and brightness of lithograph ink often carry a weird industrial sense. It is a kind of beauty that carries an instrumentalized sense of value that turns away from the force of life itself, so I layer pastel and oil stick over it with my “scary” to respond to it, bringing in a rough, dust-like texture that feels closer to the ground, to a sense of life that exists before it is assigned value. At other times, I am immersed in classical Chinese literature depicting worlds where mountains, waters, and living beings generate one another. Everything moves freely and can become something else. I paint landscapes, creatures, and human forms, and let them shift, distort, and open. Their forms are carried by the flow of paint, lingering in a state of transformation.
If there is something I return to each day in the mirror, it is the change. The Diamond Sutra (《金刚经》)says that all forms are illusory (凡所有相，皆是虚妄). I am drawn to the forms and colors in the world, and to textures that awaken synesthesia. Yet I do not trust them. I do not believe their forms will remain. I want to paint them, and then break them, into other forms. Only in this way can they be free. A fish in the sea may become a bird in flight. A body can also become a landscape. Eventually, I believe, I will also find a kind of freedom through them, my paintings, the exploration of myself.