Artist statement

My recent work is concerned with the appropriation of paintings from particular periods in European art history. Influenced by Crimp and Godeau’s argument that artistic creation comes from quotation, my painterly transcriptions transform and abstract the original in order to suggest new narratives and meanings, shaped by my own emotional and cultural experiences.

 

My paintings are generally about the relationship between painting and physical movement, and it has always been my way of working to analyse and recreate the classic works of artists from significant works of art history, abstracting them and juxtaposing and restructuring the image.

 

In my work, I express the varied emotions I feel in response to the new experiences into visual reflections, using colour, space, line, geometric shapes and texture. In my paintings, I preserve the experiences and stories I encounter with a blade-like perception, and by combining them with appropriated historical artworks. I deconstruct these found historical images and hide them in my paintings. I hope to rewrite the narrative of these selected historical paintings in this way, and to engage in a dialogue with different forms and intentions, in a different time and space whilst recognizing the historical legacy. In the transformation of the image, I aim to recreate it shaped by my own contexts and narratives, so that the original intensions of these works can be seen anew and fresh meanings can be generated.

 

In terms of methodology, I use colour, space, line and texture to reflect my fluid and changing emotions and identity. Layers of lines and controlled geometrical shapes grow, flow, change, and extend in the picture in a tuberous manner. I often use a combination of mediums, such as acrylic, watercolour, oil, gouache and ink, as well as experimenting with different compositional forms and pictorial languages to present my new ideas and expand my creative practice. The themes of my works often revolve around my own related experiences, such as identity, spirituality, freedom, emotional expression and so on.

 

Keywords: Abstract Painting, Emotional Painting, Abstracted Classic Paintings