I use wooden pallets as a raw material to imply a life of export, hard labour and transition for Chinese people, who are leaving their own country, journeying to a new life in unfamiliar territory.
These three paintings are dedicated to every woman who has gone through her life with these three steps: Revolution, Commitment and Promise.
REVOLUTION
When life is young, your soul is pure like a blank canvas and your eyes as clear as crystal.
You are brave, the possibility of your future is endless, the whole world is waiting for you to discover.
COMMITMENT
Once life is settled, your unconditional love is the centre of your universe. You are willing to give up your own dreams and carry all the burden on your shoulders just like a wooden pallet overloaded with all the heavy goods, layer by layer and its never ending.
You still smile and are willing to accept it everyday.
PROMISE
You have completed your promise during your lifetime.
Your path will not cross this way anymore and you are finally free.
It is time for my promise - to bring you to a bigger world that you have never seen in your life time.
Mum I love you.
Paintings based on a photograph always raise me up to a greater plane of passion and emotion.
The fact that any old photographs have had their own imagery that already exists, reworking it will create a different interpretation that you may never imagine.
To me, painting from a photograph has the ability to generate more ideas, it will open up a different content and painting has this power to reinvent the information from the imagery and give it another quality.
It can recreate lost or damaged memories.
In my personal interpretation, even though painting based on these old photographs, I feel like I can treat it as a way to redemption from the past and to free myself from the mistakes I made in life.
If you compare painting and photography, photos can only catch the reality of the moment and freeze it in that particular moment, as soon as one takes a photograph, it all becomes a memory. It becomes past. It doesn't give you as much space as painting does.
When translating from a photograph into painting, somehow, it would bring the imagery into the present day.
Painting allows the making process to evolve over a long time. When you look at them, they can manipulate more space than photos do.
You can even project your own feeling with it. Some paintings can open up the field of representation and multiple reading and that can generate and reveal new potential meanings as viewers fill in the blank spaces.
Look at Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.
Painting, infact, remains open ended.
Private view evening
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Bournemouth Library
