I often contemplate my own situation with paintings. I found that I was held in gaps: the gap between mainland China and Hong Kong, and the gap between my hometown, a newborn city composed mostly of immigrants, and me, the first generation who actually called that place “home.” There is also the undeniable gap between Chinese and American cultures. I’m constantly under these push-and-pull forces.
My paintings don’t usually point to a specific event. I choose to hide from that exposure. To me, painting is a very loud media that can be heard from very far. However, when I’m painting, it’s more like collecting pieces of a puzzle. I compress events from real life, languages, and experiences of me and others to distort, destroy, and disguise them with a world of patterns. They are isolated, rootless, fragile, and almost photophobic.