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The Flow of the City
60cmx90cm
Acrylic, marker,
color sticker on canvas
November, 2020
This work consists of two layers. The first layer is a combination of flowing water, clouds, wind, and fireworks. Bringing to the audience is a feeling of transitory, illusory, untouchable, and pleasant. It is a cumulation of countless colourful lines with Innumerable direction.
I liken the lines to every experience in our lives as the traces had left after every decision we made, whether beautiful or mirthless, it is part of this cumulation. A Chinese idiom said that things would develop in the opposite direction when they become extreme. This idiom gives the meaning of colour in my works. An abundance of colours mean colourless, just like no one can tell you what is the colour of water, clouds, and lights because their colours are always affected by the environment, but they do not have their specific colours. In my work, this ethereal combination symbolizes a macroscopical perspective. It is a relationship between desire and illusory.
The second layer comes from my attention to contemporary societies. I took a night scene in the centre of London. The fluorescent lamps are a symbol of the prosperous city. It is a microcosm of modern human civilization. Then, I extracted it in a pixelated way through the picture. Combining these two chapters allows me to examine our current pursuit of prosperity from a macroscopical perspective. Finally, I realized no one could truly possess those prosperous things, because all the things will quickly pass away like water, fireworks, wind and clouds.
This work describes that we live in a highly developed Internet era, presenting an invisible digital life. This work consists of two layers. The first layer is the background that looks like a modern city layout with many straight lines. For me, the straight line symbolizes rationality, pattern, efficiency and modernization. As a matter of fact, the city layout is originally from a computer mainboard. Although computer motherboards are small, their highly integrated and intricate designs can represent the most cutting-edge technology in human civilization and a symbol of globalization. On this basis, I enlarged the computer mainboard and added a lot of small colourful sticker dots. These dots look like fluorescent lights at night in the city and like people walking on the road. We can see that there is a small distance between people because I want to express those people in modern society have a side of self-independence and another side of alienation from others.
In the second layer, there is a combination, and its shape is originally from the tsunami. In the beginning, I was influenced by the works of American fibre sculptor Janet Echelman who explores the cutting edge of sculpture, public art, and urban transformation. She and her team often use fibres to weave a massive net as public art and hang the net in the city's sky. The massive net in the sky will constantly change various forms with the flow of wind. Personally, the tsunami is a vast, rapidly changing, mysterious, fascinating object, but also extremely dangerous. I want to use it as a metaphor to compare the rapid development of the Internet era. It has brought so much convenience to us and strengthened our global cooperation. At the same time, there are more and more people are addicted to it and have formed a severe dependence on it.
The Flow of the City 2
90cmx60cm
Acrylic, marker, color sticker on canvas
November, 2020
Cloud
60cmx90cm
Acrylic, marker,
color sticker on canvas,
December, 2020
This work explores the relationship between our real life and virtual life in the current Internet age. Cloud has two types of meaning, and one part refers to the clouds in the sky in our daily life. Another part refers to the Cloud on the Internet. The clouds in the sky are uncertain. It is always in a state of rapid change. This is what attracts me the most, just like we live in a fast-paced, fast-changing, and unpredictable world. I used a projector to copy the lines from a picture of clouds rather than create them directly.
The second part of the work is the Internet Cloud, a virtual and abstract concept, but it has deeply affected each of our lives. It comes from an album in my MacBook, and it has been uploaded to my iCloud. It is a record of my life and experiences in the past few years. I turned this photo wall into a pixel wall for two reasons. On the one hand, the essence of the photo is composed of many pixels, and the computer recognizes the content through these pixels. On the other hand, a small video I made inspired me to do this. This small video is a panoramic photo of the Milky Way taken by NASA. The capacity of this photo is huge. When I move this enlarged picture quickly, a continuous image can be formed. Each planet in the video is like a jumping pixel moving through time and space.
When I combined the cloud lines with my photo wall stored in the Cloud, I began to think about the relationship between reality and illusion. The clouds in the sky are real, but they are always in a rapidly changing state, so how do we prove that it is real? The Cloud on the Internet is virtual, and the photos stored in it are essentially pixels, but they are relatively eternal, so can we still say that it is virtual?
Moment
60cmx90cm
Marker, acrylic on canvas,
December, 2020
This work consists of two layers, the first layer is the spoondrift and the second layer is the city lights. I want to combine them to explore the relationship between moments and eternity in the context of space-time. The sea is always very attractive to me. It can continuously change into various forms. Each form is like an emotion, but it only remains in a moment that is the only way we can perceive it, there is no eternity. Then, the sea will renew to a state of calm. Nevertheless, the sea seems to be eternal, just like the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto said, "the seawater a million years ago is no different from the seawater today." Because of the seawater has no concept of time, it will not expire due to time.
I often stay at the beach and spend lots of time watching the sea beating against the beach, again and again, watching it change into various spoondrift of different shapes, and then disappear quickly, followed by new spoondrift. This is a repetitive process, But its appearance is different every time, just like when we look back on our lives from our memory, the days are repeated, but the lives of each day are not. We cannot stop time at a specific moment, whether it is joyful or sad, time will push us forward to welcome a new day, just like the spoondrift on the seaside will always be pushed to the beach by the new spoondrift behind it. On and then disappeared the same. I used photography to record many moments of the spoondrift and selected one of them that looked more like mountains. On the one hand, mountains and water have many special meanings and symbols in Chinese traditional culture; on the other hand, mountains are eternal relative to water.
Light is a mysterious and unique existence. We cannot feel its existence through touch. Besides, it has some similarities with water. For example, light is eternal without a concept of time, and it can travel through the universe for millions of years without substantial changes. However, we cannot collect and store light, and we can only perceive its existence through every moment.
I used a combination of spoondrift and lights to explore the relationship between the present and the past, which triggers the viewer to pay their attention to each moment of the present and think about how to face their past from a macroscopical perspective.
This work reflects my childhood memories that are far away from now, so it has become blurred and an impression. Memory is our brain's way to record our real experiences while recalling is our virtual experience based on our past experiences. Video games are the greatest pleasure of my childhood and my main form of entertainment. This work consists of three parts. The first part is the background. It comes from a screenshot of a video that has been damaged. We can't see the specific content in this video except for colours and pixels, just like the long memories in our brains will also be damaged by time, and finally become impressions and feelings. The second part is some colourful geometric figures. I did not create these figures directly on the canvas. Instead, these geometric figures were screenshots from my laptop window. Firstly, I deleted a few files randomly on the window so that there are some missing spaces. This process is just like we all have some missing memories in our experiences. Subsequently, I took a screenshot of the computer desktop. Then, I used the software to pixelate the picture to ensure that this picture and the video screenshot are digital styles. The third part is that I used some colourful round stickers on the canvas.
When I was a child, I was attracted by colourful circles because they could make me happy. They symbolize some of the beautiful things in my childhood, such as colourful and lovely candies, fruits, balloons, footballs and so on. I'd like to present a kind of fun as children's video games, such as Super Mario and Squirrel War, by combining pixelated geometric figures and bright and vivid colours.
This work has changed my attitude towards life; I no longer pursue some classic things. Instead, I try to live in the moment like children, enjoy the moment, and be attracted by popular and colourful items.