Visiting A Park is not Searching for An Epiphany
Author/Yixuan Liu
Maybe because the "cliche" of figurative painting created some kind of emotion to me, nostalgia becomes an inevitable element in my paintings, with a paranoid unclear, and may last a long time.
My recent works shift from still life to creating artificial landscapes that have a sense of deliberation. The aesthetic orientation created by our viewing habits has resulted in a lot of "standards of looking." Those standards are obvious and straightforward in old images such as old posters and photographs. It often seems futile to use painting to break these standards deliberately. I am more inclined to collectively parody those "standards of looking" make possible deviations and provoke a certain degree of strangeness.
Old things and people often have an out-dated elegance; it is serious leisure. In the painting "Goddess," the old-fashioned park sculpture has a quality of in-between familiar and unfamiliar, and it has a special kind of beauty for me. On the other hand, by repeating the elements in my composition, only some of the symbolic meaning is preserved, trying to weaken the narratives in my composition, thus presenting a one-sided sense of an artificial landscape. Just like memory is often intermittent and fragmented, often without rich logical details, these one-sided landscapes co-responding with memory, becomes a metaphor of "not profound."
Compared to the sadness that nostalgia usually brings, I prefer painting with a slight enjoyment tendency to achieve the "not profound" expression, which is simple normality. Just like visiting a park, it is not searching for an epiphany.
