Dramatized Propositions
Members only Meet-the-Artist reception: Thursday, September 26, 2019
The Butler Institute of American Art
524 Wick Avenue
Youngstown, Ohio 44502
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Artist Statement:
As I am coming home, returning from the “good old Europe”, I hear the rap music as soon as boarding the New York subway, then I realize I am once again in the zone of the “real world”.
As I am coming home, across the Hudson River, looking back from the Path entry of Exchange Place, the sculpture of the Katyn massacre and the main building of the WTC, in a straight line, referring to each other of the opposite shores of Hudson, each of them depicting a human tragedy. It intrigues me very much: what is in people’s mind when they have confronted such a perspective?
As the water of Hudson runs down, and runs out to the open sea, I have such notion in my head: the character of water — what goes around, what comes around.
As the moment when I relocated to NYC, I thought this was the place, with all the people coming from deferent places of the world, though having one thing in common — they did want some kind of goal in their life time, they wanted to make it here, that was the reason they came to New York. Searching, expectant, anticipating… so much for the purpose, we didn’t have such sense back home, we didn’t need a purpose to go on. Without a purpose here, it seems no place for it.
Of course, there is no place like New York, as it has been said: New York state of mind, New York state of drama, New York State of dynamic.
After working with the water medium for decades, I have the parallel paradoxes in my thought; watercolor painting, work on paper, originally coming from the conventional stage of being delicate/romantic, then confronting it’s opposite environments today; and human as we are, coming from the nature of being fragile/vulnerable, then crash into each other in this ocean of human in our time. From the practice of water medium painting, thinking of water this giving element, how it etherealizes into air; synchronizes humanity through its transforming stages; and how it carries color pigment, makes its remark on the paper… in parallel notion to human lives.