Artist statement

I grew up in Beijing, a big city with lots of different people. Beijing is full of art. The street, people’s wearing, music, dancing, of course, and painting. Within this environment, I start to love art. It could make me feel I’m alive.

I used to take a lot of art lessons. I could do color water, sketching and many kinds of art. I was always quiet, and I would do whatever my art teacher ask me to do. But, I couldn’t feel the passion inside my heart when I was taking these classes. I don’t know what’s that feeling. Sense of depression? Art should be my passion!

Until I came to Moonshot. An innovate high school, I found what is the real art in the art course and falls in love again with art. It’s not only just about painting something with some advanced skills, but it’s also about to create creatively. Create the thing that you think is beautiful creatively. That feels like your idea comes up when you are doing art rather than your plan what to do first. Then, how this course changed me?

We did a lot of projects and did a collection of experiments and research in this course. All of these projects would only give a topic to us. Then, we need to design our own style. In the meantime, you can use any materials you like, any technique you like. For instance, you can do art with a camera, clay, cotton or even stones. These options made me could create creatively and formed my own creative thinking. When I am creating my work, I could always be creative and enlighten by my work. Sometime I can’t even know what I am doing, but after the finish, I would analyze my work. This process really benefits me a lot.

From then on to now, I already did two projects, and one is still working. My first project is about “What is the real me”, kind of a self-finding. Why about myself? Because I felt I am awkward with myself, I felt so many characters in my mind and can’t distinguish them. Contradiction, entanglement and unbalance. So many feelings during this period, which is adolescence. I combined my project with psychology knowledge. Because I want psychology to be my major. After doing a lot of research, I found that my condition at that time is exactly the same as how the psychologist described adolescence. I came to know myself better and I start to express the real me in the way of art. 

In this project, the material is clay and pigment. The colorful clay represents the inside real me which is I used to look for. The pigment sprinkle on the clay represents my contradiction, entanglement, unbalance and the things that trap me.

After is work, I came to realize that maybe I am looking for the real me, but in the process of looking for myself, I find that me who actually with the pigment is more real. Through my work, you will find that when the “clay” and the “pigment” combined together actually are the whole me, the real me, it’s more wonderful and beautiful, though it looks a little bit hurt. This project made me have a new awareness of myself. Art is a really great way of self-awareness. My love for art is growing and growing.

The second project I made is about cities and countrysides. I want to do this topic is because after I went to the countryside in Yunnan, Dehong, I found something blocks the connection between Beijing and the countrysides. The entertainment now in the city also exists in the countrysides, the culture and so on. However, these connection features were blocked by something— ignorance. The countryside gained material supply by cities, but why is the countryside still poor? Because they actually don’t need these materials, but people and people’s connection and understand. The children in the countrysides need a good education school, they need a goal to walk out to the countryside. There are so many left-behind children in the countrysides. They lost their dream, even love. This fact has been ignored by charities. They put so much effort into giving but didn’t aware of the things they really need.

In my second project, I chose a symbol, whale, to represent the thing which the countryside really needs— love and hope. Why is a whale to be the symbol? Because whale is huge, for the countryside this “whale” is a key problem. But for some people, this “whale” would be invisible, because they didn’t aware of this problem.

In this project, I use pigment to express my thoughts. I tried to use different forms of the “whale”, city and the countryside. I try to focus the point on the color matching and the way to express the main idea. I really enjoy the process that different color’s collision and the visual impact really impress me. This project make me found that I really love the color collision and the tactile impression that I would use different brush strokes to paint. For instance, I would paint dots and dots to kind of make the paint more vivid.

The final project, it’s still about myself. I really love the process that discovers myself. How amazing is the human being! But, this time would be more specific. It’s about my emotions. I have got two ideas about my emotions. First, I would like to use color and different materials to express my emotion, because in the second project I found that I like color collision a lot. At the same time, I did a lot of research about color and emotion. Second, I used video to express my emotion, it is a little bit stream of consciousness, but with my consciousness, and I also unscrambled the video I record. After doing the record, I found the beauty of the camera, another way to express art. I discovered that I like to use a dark color to record things. Maybe is because at that period I’m a little bit down and blue.

All in all, I do these projects is not because I want the score, but I really love art and want to bring art into my daily life, think in art, expressed in art, do art. Art makes me feel I’m alive. And I appreciate this project could enlighten me that much.