‘Three mirrors’, Hengyi Space, Hangzhou

1. In recent years, the voice of society and market for female creators has became increasingly high, and creators are mostly expected to speak for contemporary women. Is gender identity more of an advantage or a hindrance to your creation? Why?
Although LGBT, female artists or black artists have become politically correct in art exhibitions nowadays, we should first realize that it is firstly to be a woman and then the female artist. Before confronting the question of whether gender identity is an advantage for creation or hinders more, I first have to face the question of how to exist as a woman under the patriarchy. The problems I have to face are accumulated in many aspects, and these problems will affect me, consequently, revealed in my creations. Personally speaking, my own opinion is to complete works without targeting specific issues. As a feminist, I choose to speak more in social media or in life, because language is adequate to express my views. I hope that my work is a kind of reaction or revealing of myself.

2. You often mention the favour of "randomness", "unexpectedness" and "uncertainty" in artistic creation. On the contrary, What do those step-by-step, repetitive and mechanical processes which must be faced in painting mean to you?
In fact, my painting creation is filled with a lot of mechanical labor time, such as filling colour blocks with oil pastels, or finely weaving a net with pencils on the picture. It is easy for me to enter a kind of shallow meditation in this repetitive mechanical labor. Sometimes I will loop a song to make this long mechanical process more "monotonous". During this monotonous time, I recall the moment that I temporarily forgot, thinking about topics that have attracted me, or just wandering around to get a new inspiration.

 

3. The colour system you prefer in painting seems to be similar to old photos. Is photography your usual way of accumulating materials or creating?
To be precise, photography is one of my method for accumulating materials, and at the same time, I use my reprocessed photographic images as a kind of learning material, for example, I will get inspiration for edge line processing from Polaroid photos, or from get an idea of how brushstrokes work in distorted images. My reprocessing is a process of continuous subtraction and disintegration of the information of the photo itself. This process itself is very similar to my painting.

4. Many of your portrait works are presented in this exhibition. What is your starting point when you take figures as your creative objects?
The models for the portraits in this exhibition are all people close to me in my life (or myself). In the process of painting portraits, I can feel "authenticity" and "sincereness" more strongly than other subjects. But this "authenticity" is not reflected in the resemblance between my painting and the model image. On the contrary, I sometimes deliberately separate the portrait I painted from the model image itself. This kind of "authenticity" and "sincereness" is reflected in the fact that I am painting real people at the moment, and the process of painting allows me to have a more real connection with the current world.

 

5. Although the characters in your pictures are figurative, but they make the viewer feel far away from the real world, and the atmosphere in the pictures is more emphasised. How do you explain this yourself?
Yes, I put more emphasis on the vague and ambiguous atmosphere. As I mentioned, "I sometimes deliberately separate the portrait I painted from the model image itself." I prefer the portraits I draw to remove their own characteristics, continuing to do subtraction, so that the real portrait of the picture is more restored to the "person" itself. Many of the portraits in this exhibition seem to have different facial features, but in fact I drew them based on the same model or even the same photograph.

 

6. In your works, we can often see your comprehensive application of materials. In addition to create texture, how do you consider the application of materials? Is there any other meaning?
My use of materials is influenced by my own background, animation & printmaking, both mediums have a strong sense of "layers", such as the onion skinning tool in animation, celluloid, and colour registration in printmaking. So in the process of painting, I rarely mix colour, and I usually use a layer-by-layer method. Texture is not texture for texture's sake. For example, I used tracing paper when I moved and packed my paintings, which is thin and fragile. Taking this as inspiration, I covered the tracing paper with paste on the wooden board mounted on rice paper. The layers of paper appeared wrinkled, and the paper was wet and occasionally cracked. All of this coincides with the fragility and instability I want to convey in the picture.

7. Share your daily working style with everyone!
Usually I put blank boards next to the painting I’m doing, and in my spare time I will look at these blank boards and imagine what they should "look like". Although my painting results are often random, overwriting a finished painting is a common occurrence for me. I sometimes draw sketches sometimes I don't, and I often change materials. But as a Virgo, "randomness" is also part of me. My work status is very constant. The advantage of this constancy is that even in the bottleneck period, I can know that it is stable and can be metabolised.

8. Can you tell us the direction of artistic creation in the next few years?
Remain unknown.