Pursuing an accurate language for the intangible and ineffable nature of living, being, being alive, I find my practice a passionate and immersive performative composition of writings achieved by playful scripting of semiotic expressions. For every decision I make, I capture the moment when scattered notions touch hands, forming, bearing, inventing their combined micro blast of a sparkling meaning, it is so silent, but manifesting its transformation, where the nonsense shapes itself from the ooze of void, turns into a gadget of logics, a delicate box of mechanisms that is worth ruminating at a brief second. I am aware that it is such an act of humankind, as we tend to do a lot of things to fawn on curiosity and belief but end up being amused by the products made by ourselves. This would explain why when I look in the mirror, while I expect seeing myself making some grotesque artwork, I always see a pair of playing hands.

Yet I persist asking myself what an action it is when creating the paintings, how should I perceive the action which links me to my hands and my works, maintaining the intimacy? When my hair falls into a bowl of mixed colour in my arms, why would I permit myself letting it happen? Am I supposed to indulge myself immersing my works, my making with my own subjectivity? Call it rapture or throes, as the indulgence occurs like a pouring rain; as I do not only document, illustrate, or portray, instead I allow the action to oscillate between making and playing. An intimacy and honesty can only exist in between, it is definitely not snuggling against a conclusion, it has to always be active – on the run, unsettle, announcing, clamouring for frankness – thus it finally can be able to picture how I see the Thrownness that appears to be the life form of ours.

Phew... (2024), oil on linen, 76.5 x 102 cm

My hands are aware of an urge when making every mark, as an answer to the calling of my subjectivity. The calling is frequent, and even more often when it resonates with what I see in the pictures, read in the lines, hear in the ballads. ‘Make it something like that,’ the calling says. But I cannot resist stepping back, I prefer to have my making between the greater context and I, or tuck in something more in between. At a point I realised the typical outsider tone easy to be adopted on the discourse of such subjectivity, to have a clearer view of my individuality and otherness. I ask about my own identity and belonging; through the lens of seeing living matters of others’, the social norms, cultural conventions, politics, products, beliefs, phenomena, I swallow that tightness at the tail of my tongue, and I wonder if there will always be nationalism, traditions, conflicts. As I am carrying my Chinese background here in the Western context, while I wander on the streets; my specific experience of an early 21st century modernity in Beijing, the superstitions imbedded in the materialist value, the careerism, and a pinch of nostalgia of the cultural environment, faded lifestyles, and the goals we once had, the purposeful life we once were promised–all persuades me an absurdist narrative telling the encounters and situations when I wander on the foreign streets.

Why would I see myself when observing an individual of other minds, or life form of an arthropod, a bird, a cephalopod? Why can’t I smell the stink and subtle fragrance of our loves anymore? Is my making just about questionings after all? Might we all dream of a better dream where we cease to fear changes? Why would I occasionally confuse the nostalgia as a tremble? Let’s be true, I am afraid of the enforcements blinded by the love for presumed shape of being and tolerates no diversities; but at least I have my questionings, my questionings are playful, and I don’t hate humour.