On Religion

I have a kind of religious devotion to painting. Although I use relief, drawing, printmaking, and other media for studies, the purpose of making these studies has always been for the final painting. Before arriving at the holy city of painting, I constantly reminded myself of the distant destination by repeatedly making study works in the studio on the pilgrim, which became the documentation of the performance of my prayers and the poetic visual diaries of my artistic life.

I am an atheist, brought up under the education of the Communist Party of China. The Chinese government wants its people to be anti-superstitious materialists, but at the same time, they demand people’s devotion to the Communist Party. I could not have faith in God or communism, thus the vacancy of a lord arose in my heart. It is such a difficult life living with an empty soul, so my slavishness keeps looking for my next dominant, and my atheism always yearns for my next object of faith, which recently I choose painting.

I have always chosen things in nature as objects of creation, not out of my love for nature, but by using the man and nature relationship as a metaphor for the power structure of the outer world and myself. Using rhetorics to veil my actual words, the natural beings paint the pseudo-self-portraits for me, confronting the audience in masks of their appearances.

I've been drawing horses lately. The horse is not only a patriarchal symbol of war, glory, and power, but human figures have always been in dominant in the artworks of horses throughout history, and human is always the guide and the enslaver of the horse: they lead the horses, ride on the horses’ backs, imprison horses in barns, shave the horses’ manes, and trim the horses’ hooves… But when humans bent down and support their body with both hands, we could so easily become the four-legged livestocks, or slaves.

Asians, as model minorities, are often accused of being subservient to white people and European colonialism. But I believe that many Chinese people, like I am, feel that the feudal oppression in our own country is more intense and suffocating than the racist exploitation we experience in Western countries. I often can't tell if it really is racism or just another common rebuke that I should endure when I am subjected to racial discrimination. From a young age, we have learned to ignore and forget the pain of ourselves and others in order not to be murdered by tests of submissiveness. But I've always dreaded this numbness. They say that horses have always been like this: humans feed us, bathe us, shoe us, stroke us… We should learn to be content so that we can feel happiness. However, I have seen horses that run to fractures in the derby being shot right by the side of the racing track, ponies born with bad quality being disposed of as garbage, and mares being used as sexual hunt for novelty——I am more afraid of the disastrous consequences that could be brought by resisting humans.

I imagined the freedom of horses running and playing in the wild in the drawings while being reminded at all times of the boundaries of freedom by the borders of the frame I created for the series of drawings. My fingers stroked the paper, removing specks of dust that had covered the imagined horses, and crashed on the walls of the frame at the edges, incapable of leading the horses out of the fortress besieged. I felt the joy when my fingers touched and parted the charcoal dust, while soberly being aware of the suffering of these horses who contort their bodies to abnormality to fit into the small frame. In the playful freedom of playing with the materials, I was gradually engulfed by the inevitable repression of the narrative. But I have learned to take a nap before being completely drowned by the past.

Even though painting should not be guided by narrative or be disturbed by any material outside the paint in its privilege of form, I carry the original sins of narrative and material with me, believing that the critical category of painting could forgive and accommodate such a heterogeneous painter, while punishing myself with the guilt of escaping from the orthodoxy of painting. The god of painting must have loved me, and they are expecting my offering of a “good” painting for them. This less elegant way of praying is also reflected in my imperative physical contact with painting. I have to touch my work directly with my body: smoothing the clay with palms, peeling the plaster off with nails, rubbing the charcoal dust with fingertips, pressing paint into the canvas with full hands… I also need to stay close to my work, close enough that I can smell the toxic scent of the material so that the painting can burrow into me and drive the gravity of my soul to make me cry for it.

Outside the world of reality, I project alter-egos of myself on the painting as my god. The false god has helped me to buttress a momentary sense of autonomous freedom under the present oppressed inevitability and shaped a conceivable hope in the process of painting, where I believe a future happiness could be starting from. Under the authoritative form of painting, I seek the subtle vulnerability in this category. And from the gutter where the great contemporary paintings spurn, I worship my own paganism, masquerading my arts to be paintings.