Sabrina Zhao is a Chinese American figurative painter creating a space between the boundaries of the obscured and revealed. Their work primarily houses drawing material paired with traditional Chinese folklore and painting methodology to contemplate self perception, self understanding, and their position relative to the world.
Everything I Make is Hindsight.
I was recently asked if I knew about the act of becoming. I answered that I knew the feeling well, that the act of becoming was more of a feeling. It’s as if you, depersonalized, could watch a montage or timelapse of yourself change, while internalizing it over a brief period of time, maybe even (almost) instantaneously. I’ve come to realize though, that every understanding of a shift, hinges solely on the speed of hindsight.
Hindsight, understanding things after they pass, is the incubator of realization. It’s what triggers the sense of growth, of change. It is the room I look back on and the door I close.
I tend to look at the ground when I walk. I see pathways riddled with cracks running deep into the road. And at times, when I walk without intention, the edge of unevenness presses against my feet, and I stumble over the leftovers of another year’s shifting.
In Daoist thinking, nothing exists without an opposite component. As I walk down my life’s path, I look back on the ghosts emerging. Every crack and mark on the way both exists and becomes. They are the end ripple of a wake and they are the spearhead of a rift. To witness this fractalization is to reflect upon myself and others around me, as we (and our interactions with others) simultaneously exist in eternity yet continuously begin to exist. And in turn, I’ve been chasing this kind of ephemera. Running after a sensation of both moving forward and living in memory.
As a painter, I lean on words like uncovering, restoration, archaeology, etc. I look towards actions like becoming and revealing. I carry this obsession towards events carried by the progression of time, making things that are in conversation with the predecessor, the interpretation of pattern and shape. I would fall back on lofty terms like introspection and reflection, thinking it a bit esoteric, a bit spiritual. All of these things still are processed by time, realized in time. But, is it not all just my hindsight?
When I am drawing or painting, be it with ink, with graphite , or with oil, I am constantly looking towards the next thing to add or take away. I can sense the shape of the work emerging akin to bricks creating a house. When I add a mark or a stroke or a color, it exists as mark, stroke or as color. Only when I take a step back, can I sense the flesh of the work accumulating, becoming the body, as if it is coming into existence. The elements of mark and color start to work in tandem, creating the edge, creating the body and the ground it stands on. However, though the work exists as does anything else, it’s message and concept can only be actualized with hindsight. With intention set on personal reflection and disciplining, I had created work demanding interrogation. It depends on the progression of time, retracing the steps until it becomes a path, fishing for nostalgia out of a sea of memories. No matter what I try to retrieve, no matter what I try to confess, none of it could ever be realized unless I looked back.