Artist Statement

        As an artist, I explore the overwhelmingness of confronting socio-political issues from an individual perspective, through the combination of oil painting, calligraphy, photo transfers, and found materials. My approach to considering the grandness of this subject is influenced by a novel called The Temple of the Golden Temple, in which the protagonist is overpowered by the magnificence of the temple and attempts to commit suicide in it by burning it down. The feelings that overwhelm me come from my own family’s history, the tragic news I read online, and the difficulty of expressing these issues under censorship. The multiplicity of visual languages in my work speaks to the sense of impossibility and the stress of communicating my intentions, and becomes evidence of the endurance of the artist.

The scale of my artwork exists in two extremes—either as big as architecture or as small as a sheet of paper. I want to remind the audience of the relationship between the scale of art and their own bodies. In the ways that I did while making the work, I hope my viewer is in search of a form, reaches out to it, recognizes more than they initially see, and eventually gets lost in the experience of perception.

In the Window series, I use “window” as a motif to envision the space beyond my reach. The layering of foreground and background alludes to the entanglement between my physical presence in the U.S. and the people and things I care about in China. I wave visual metaphors of systems with repetitive elements and hope they can help the audience reconsider the power dynamics between one and the multiple as well as the visibility and invisibility of individuals in the context of collectivism.

— June 2024