In recent works, I have been committing myself to developing an individualistic discourse in, and from, the fountainhead of painting. I am attempting to establish a new set of language for ink and wash painting expression, thus bringing the ornamentality, allegoristic, and narrativity of the painting into new play, and making the ink and wash painting a genuinely open language, which, can be truly adapted with pluralistic expressions, to meet the challenges of the current culture. Meanwhile I am bent to seek a kind of otherness – for the present age is one of individuality and pluralism.
“Ink and wash painting” is neither a label of my identity nor a tool for striving for cultural rights. Instead, it is a conscious choice for the expression of my own ideas – I am fond of and good at employing such a media, as its extreme plasticity implies an infinite possibility of the linguistic expression of the painting.
Through the media, ink and water, what I seek to express is the material and the spirit in it. At the same time, I tend to endow my works with a new humanistic spirit. The drawings have become an open space, haunted by all sorts of my experiences, feelings, thinking, and memories. What is implicated in the suspenseful, pan-religious situations are perhaps new imaginations, personal passions, sub consciousness, historical marks, religious mystery, and of course, sexuality and temptation.
Most of my paintings are concerned with memory, or everyday life. I’m interested in exploring the relation between the traditional and the contemporary, or to be exact, in finding out what has remained in today’s life that have been always with us, and in what forms they exist in us. I have a great interest in the historical unity and continuity, for I believe that our tradition, as a spiritual flux, can keep our memories coherent and is thus indispensable to the maintenance of the vitality of our culture, and that it can remain to be something recognizable, while at the same time ensuring the constant transformation of our culture. To be sure, we can never return to the past, nor can we express ourselves in the same way as before. I am dedicated to making traditional media utter new voices, and making both images and ideas related to our everyday experiences.
What I am most concerned about is the relation between the traditional and the contemporary, though it may be vague and ambiguous. However, the very vagueness and ambiguity are exactly where its charm lies. It is of trivial significance whether this relation is a kind of connection, or a sort of betrayal. Instead of elucidating explicitly, I am just trying to suggest and make a neutral expression, so that my narration would not fall into a new kind of discursive hegemony. The way of painting, that I have been sticking to, is in fact my current cultural standpoint: that is, not aiming at being faster and newer.
