Artist Statement

When I think of China, I think of love. I think of the people I love, and the sense of familiarity that I crave. My love is for a time that is gone forever. For me, as for many Chinese children, playtime meant study time. Even when I was in elementary school, my mom took me to hair salons every week to have someone else wash my hair in between my tutoring sessions to save time for studying. Even if I could go back home, I could never go back to the way things were—and even if I could go back to the way things were, I couldn't go back to the way things weren't: a childhood that was not a rehearsal for adulthood but its own wild, vital drama. For me, creating art is my way of grieving my childhood. By depicting my childhood, my artwork primarily explores my evolving relationship with family and homeland.

I use mineral pigments, metal leaves, and a decorative, maximalist visual language to render some sensuous, unreal dreams. In these tense, eerie flashes from my sleeping mind, I teeter high above the city on a wobbling ladder, raft through a flooded greenhouse, flee from a crashing plane, or find myself imprisoned in my own apartment . . .These paintings give voice to my long-held discontent with the loss of personal freedom and my longing for an ideal childhood that has gone for good.

In other pieces, I also make paintings of everyday objects, a reflection of the collective memories of Chinese people— silkworms (a common pet for Chinese kids), shiny glazed birthday cakes, and little paper parachutes (a kind of confetti wrapped inside Spring Festival fireworks). Unlike my paintings of dreams, I crosshatch opaque watercolor to mimic a weaving texture or flickering old TV screens. The blurriness of the mark-making resembles my distant memories of simple joyous moments, dusted and echoing quietly in a corner but leaving some small ripples occasionally.

Being a queer person, I constantly felt fettered in China and actively emigrated, but I consider China my forever homeland. My fixation on childhood reifies my longing for an idealized, utopian China—warm and pure, but fading away. My paintings ask open questions, inviting viewers into dialogue both with the image and with one another. I hope that my artwork maps out new perspectives for anyone who has not shared my experience, and welcomes home anyone who has.