From Silence to Images

I did not inherit a path into art. I had to build one for myself.

If I had never started painting, I might have become an oil worker in China. I did not come from an artistic family, and I had no clear system or tradition to rely on. For me, art was never simply a career choice. It became a way to resist a life that already seemed decided for me.

My work began with a conflict: I could feel certain things very strongly, but I often could not explain them clearly in words. Painting became another way of thinking. It allowed me to work with emotions, memories, family relationships, control, and the pressure of social expectations without having to reduce them to one clear statement.

Much of my earlier work came from experiences that were very specific to growing up in China, especially around family structure and authority. Since coming to Canada, I have started to think about these questions in a broader way. Some of the situations I grew up with may not exist here in the same form, but control, pressure, identity, and the feeling of being shaped by outside forces still exist everywhere.

This has changed the way I want to make work.

I am becoming less interested in telling the viewer exactly what an image means. Instead, I want to create situations where meaning appears slowly through looking.

For my current work, I am thinking about scale, distance, gaps, and relationships between images. One project will spread across a large wall through many separate paintings rather than one complete image. Another work will use two side-by-side animated screens, with hand-drawn figures moving between them. The two screens will be separate, but they will constantly affect each other.

In both projects, I am interested in the same question: What can an image make us feel before we know how to explain it?

I do not want the work to give one final answer. I want it to leave enough space for viewers to build their own connections.