From the initial idea of my Sunflower paintings, I wanted to express a reality of the feeling applying to living; Its like Expressionist painters after World War II, who strove to express their personal feelings and their sense of their own radical individuality.
In the reality, things happen that can change the direction of your work, one moment I am painting my sunflower paintings and the next moment, my intention is drawn in a totally different direction into my work due to some sad news happened - my mother's death.
Reality is not always delightful. That is true; life can be unkind. Being a painter, you are conscious to release you emotion and pain that pass through your work in order to make an escape for the reality and that can drive us making the process of the outcome of the work totally unknown. Though you are already totally in control of your work, in fact, life can be fragile especially when our emotions crash and break down.
Despite for the past two years after I recevied the news of my mother's cancer. I was in and out between HK and UK frequently. I still failed to stay with my mother for her last day.
The complex feeling between sadness and regretness caused myself a serious affected in the work of process.
I want to bring out being a human, how much we can suffer from the pain extenal and internally....
When I am in pain, I embraced my body tight till ache and hope that can realease the pain both inside and outside...
Thats how these Sunflowers' paintings produced...three different level of pain.
The sunflowers died out of season and I felt I am one of them, all remain just the empty body.
Mother has finally passed away in this summer.
Few months ago,I spoke to her on the phone mention that
I was spreading sunflowers’ seed in my garden.
She said she wanted to see them bloom with her own eyes.
Few months later,
I flew over thousands miles away from England,
With a bundle of home grown sunflower held in my heavy hands.
Mother wouldn’t see how beautifully the sunflower is.
She lay on an unfamiliar bed with her eyes closed.
I drew her icy hand onto my face.
All I could feel was she no longer there with me.
Mum, I am backed.
I love you…..
I love … very… much….
I repeated and repeated this broken sentence to her ear.
It is only a simple few words but I could not complete it probably.
It rained and rained everyday in this summer.
In fact, there is no summer in England this year.
I walked through the street without shelter myself,
I rub my body dry,
As the way my mother used to dry myself.
It’s a raining Summer 2008.
The seeds remind inside the head of the flowers just like stars hiding in the day light and you can only see them shine when it is dark at night.
Where the darker the sky is, the brighter the stars are and they are always shine in the distance and never lost.
That is how the stars falling from the sky....