Curatorial Statement
Lips Still, Eyes Open
When Silence Speaks Loudest
2016
Acrylic on canvas
60.5 x 60cm
2016
Acrylic on canvas
60.5 x 60cm
A weapon forced into those small
trembling hands.
Child fingers on a trigger.
Life and Death both pause with breaths caught in stillness.
Whose life, whose death?
Try as it might, Time cannot hold still;
it hurtles toward the answer.
The moment before a gunshot.
The moment just after.
Silence.
The barrel of a gun gleams with duty fulfilled.
A shadow seems imprinted now in those eyes that stare back, unblinking, rife with whispered screams.
You stir — the shadow stirs. It is your reflection.
A question rings loudly, unspoken.
Child fingers on a trigger.
Life and Death both pause with breaths caught in stillness.
Whose life, whose death?
Try as it might, Time cannot hold still;
it hurtles toward the answer.
The moment before a gunshot.
The moment just after.
Silence.
The barrel of a gun gleams with duty fulfilled.
A shadow seems imprinted now in those eyes that stare back, unblinking, rife with whispered screams.
You stir — the shadow stirs. It is your reflection.
A question rings loudly, unspoken.
The Human Condition
2016
Watercolour/coloured pencil/chalk pastel
43.5 x 58cm
The Human Condition robs its subject of her agency of speech with a hand that mutes her lips. What is unspoken in words is left to be expressed, as ever, in the silence of an unflinching gaze.
Though it is her own hand that appears to stifle her, this speaks nothing of willingness. Her hands, she is told, are not her own. Her body belongs to another; her life is not hers to decide. This is a quiet dedication to a young girl who feels powerless and choiceless in her situation, sold to the highest eligible bidder.
The girl’s face is comprised of strips and pieces, obscuring and dissembling her true image. Much like all things hidden and repressed, no one can ever truly know her; what we see of her is simply a visage pieced together, and what we know of her is only what is visible. Just as how the full view of her face remains a mystery, what she might say if given a chance to speak remains unheard.
Note that the conceptualization of The Human Condition was influenced by a set of Rene Magritte’s paintings of the same name in which he plays with the easy fallibility of human perception. While creating this piece, I was similarly captivated by questions latent in the relationship between representation and truth and, like Magritte, wanted to examine their intersection through art.
Clothed in Red
2016
Pencil-crayon/mixed-media
42 x 35cm
This woman is dressed with opulence, yet her face and body are scarcely outlined; devoid of colour, she is seen for her adornments and becomes naught more than a body clothed in the pleasure of red.
Craving autonomy and desperately wishing to reveal her unclothed identity, the woman wonders:
Standing naked, will they finally be able to see me?
Grim and determined, she struggles to tear away her tangible adornments.
If they see me, will they love me?
Trying to disregard the resistance tugging against her movements, she pauses only ever so slightly. Yet an unwitting and unwelcome thought appears in her mind, fleeting, as though wanting to run from itself:
Perhaps they prefer me as just a body clothed in red.
We are not privy to the final slip of cloth, nor do we see the shake in her hands as brilliant red cascades about her.
2016
Pencil-crayon/mixed-media
42 x 35cm
This woman is dressed with opulence, yet her face and body are scarcely outlined; devoid of colour, she is seen for her adornments and becomes naught more than a body clothed in the pleasure of red.
Craving autonomy and desperately wishing to reveal her unclothed identity, the woman wonders:
Standing naked, will they finally be able to see me?
Grim and determined, she struggles to tear away her tangible adornments.
If they see me, will they love me?
Trying to disregard the resistance tugging against her movements, she pauses only ever so slightly. Yet an unwitting and unwelcome thought appears in her mind, fleeting, as though wanting to run from itself:
Perhaps they prefer me as just a body clothed in red.
We are not privy to the final slip of cloth, nor do we see the shake in her hands as brilliant red cascades about her.
Daughter, 女儿
2015
Mixed-media/watercolour
45.5 x 60cm (white paper)
This work is dedicated to the lost daughters of China.
The faces of four young girls are depicted with clarity, the number made significant as a homonym of the Chinese word for ‘death’.
Cherry blossom branches define the jawline of a girl’s face and outline the loose yin-yang composition. Burned ultrasounds of female fetuses connected by red string serve as a frame, symbolic of bloodlines, charred moments in history, the realities of female infanticide, the frailty of life.
Daughter is signed with my given Chinese name in recognition that, like those young girls who stare earnestly at us from within the painting, I too am someone’s 女儿.
2016
Watercolour
60 x 45.5cm
Look closer. Venom and vulnerability entwine within an individual’s carefully coiffed exterior. Beauty intermingles with a discreet threat as though they have always belonged together. Snakes play amongst flowers and silken black hair.
This is a portrait inspired by a real woman who lived in tumult. Both flowers and snakes are worn as part of her disguise, wielded with a dizzying combination of guarded wariness, obligation, and unbridled empowerment. And perhaps if we look long enough, we might just glimpse an extraordinary underlying resilience; in her eyes is a quiet but dignified refusal.
This piece highlights the human tendency to use camouflage and concealment as a means of protection. It is, after all, such a curious and powerful ability to mask oneself with smoke and mirrors. Gilded shields reveal, at a glance, so little of what lies beneath; appearances are both weaponry and armour.
Time
2014
Ink
49.5 x 32.5cm
This piece is a dialogue between an individual and Time.
By outlining a snapshot of my life from birth to the point of this piece’s creation in symbols on a single page, I reveal how an individual and Time each act as measurements of the other; with every image I inked on paper, I marked a way in which my identity, as it grew and progressed, is inextricable from the fabric of time, and how the progression of time in turn consists, from my perspective, partly of my life. With this piece, I reflect upon how I am one entity with Time, and how this relationship is key to the human condition; though Time feels omnipotent, we give it its potency. We live striving to give potency to our transience — to fill the pages, like this one, of our life.
At the fore are inkings of my own hands, positioned to spell a word that has been an indelible factor of the human condition: hope. Just as there is no concept of white without black, when an individual knows darkness, she has already known hope.
A large cracked clock face underlies the piece, evoking the omnipresent, omniscient, imperturbable quality of Time as a silent master at the foundation of all. A small clock face is shown near the center, cracked in the same places and hands stopped to the same minute as the one in the background — indeed, it is the same clock, viewed from a distance. Here I deliberate how time seems to condense with the distance of hindsight in apparent contrast to how it fills our vision in the immediacy of a moment, juxtaposing both macro- and micro-scopic views of time in the same frame.
2014
Ink
49.5 x 32.5cm
This piece is a dialogue between an individual and Time.
By outlining a snapshot of my life from birth to the point of this piece’s creation in symbols on a single page, I reveal how an individual and Time each act as measurements of the other; with every image I inked on paper, I marked a way in which my identity, as it grew and progressed, is inextricable from the fabric of time, and how the progression of time in turn consists, from my perspective, partly of my life. With this piece, I reflect upon how I am one entity with Time, and how this relationship is key to the human condition; though Time feels omnipotent, we give it its potency. We live striving to give potency to our transience — to fill the pages, like this one, of our life.
At the fore are inkings of my own hands, positioned to spell a word that has been an indelible factor of the human condition: hope. Just as there is no concept of white without black, when an individual knows darkness, she has already known hope.
A large cracked clock face underlies the piece, evoking the omnipresent, omniscient, imperturbable quality of Time as a silent master at the foundation of all. A small clock face is shown near the center, cracked in the same places and hands stopped to the same minute as the one in the background — indeed, it is the same clock, viewed from a distance. Here I deliberate how time seems to condense with the distance of hindsight in apparent contrast to how it fills our vision in the immediacy of a moment, juxtaposing both macro- and micro-scopic views of time in the same frame.
Inner Strength
2014
Graphite
29.5 x 25cm
She rises, undiminished.