Statement
In the US, my body carries the expectation to be a cultural translator and caretaker. Visibility risks confrontation and categorization, while invisibility is to contain a boiling rage and be worn down by it. The absence of figures in my works oscillates between omnipresence and erasure. Representing the body is a redundant lost cause, except when the body is in disguise to perform.
Rolling the ink and pressing down my forearms to make prints and collages, I transfer a heaviness onto paper. To draw a long line across a larger-than-life surface is to construct a space and have power over the viewer. Painting on translucent voile and silver reflective canvas appropriates the provisional environment and its persistent expectations. I bring them into the painting and paint over them. Air-brushed pigment drifts through unprimed voile to expose the fragility of this intervention. I pour thick, black acrylic from behind this porous fabric, like a melancholy bodily fluid that stains the white walls of the Western gallery and the painted illusions of Chinese Academic Realism.
Beds and chairs stand for mental states and relationships. Making the figures disappear protects complex thoughts and feelings from being flattened into what the viewer tends to ascribe to othered bodies. But invisibility invites erasure. Chairs, with their backs facing each other, come from the solidarity of sisterhood but are too often interpreted through the lens of romantic love. A silhouetted figure is assumed to be white and male. Gentle erasure disguised as relatability makes an ambient violence that slowly suffocates. To not have bodies at all is an imaginary end to unavoidable human violence.
In the conundrum of flattening and erasure, I turn to female subhuman beings from classical Chinese myth and literature. Because of perceived inferiority or unresolved grievance, they linger at the margins of society. If they possess patriarchal ideals of female virtue, they earn honorary human status through marriage and childbirth. Contemporary rewrites release the subhuman beings from the reward system. The snake sisters from Legend of the White Snake become a symbol of female homosociality and queer kinship. Exploring new modes of relationships entails a lack of guiding narratives and requires disguise to dodge social punishment. Alluding to the snake sisters and the reptilian lesbians in Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile, I manipulate paint to disguise and metamorphose. I paint women putting on contact lenses with vertical slit-shaped pupils to shed crocodile’s tears about the parting of chosen sisters(siblings) and the death of idealized men. Human form hides beneath snake skin, because mourning as a human is to be sentenced: you must survive losing anyone, and die alone. You had it coming when you tore the contract we prepared for you.
Painting is insufficient to communicate intense, bodily grief. Reminded of Ana Mendieta’s statement that “painting is not real enough,” I make direct marks with thread, fabrics, and worn clothes. I found my answer to Chinese Academic Realism, my earliest art education, and a constant source of pressure. I reverse the relationship between object and representation: use ribbons and wires to represent blinds.
To the Chinese audience, my object paintings represent Western education and aesthetics. To those trained in the academies, the statement implies insufficient understanding of anatomy and perspectives, as well as flawed brushwork techniques. The utter confusion of my figure drawing tutor for a moment made me go blank and question if my visual and conceptual languages are inaccessible to an audience I want to reach.
The drive to learn another language is the thing suspended in translation: how do I tell you, a visceral feeling.