statement

I was born in the biggest city in China--Shanghai and the urban life, the people live there, the pace you can feel in every day life influence my art a lot. Since 1990s, the so called “opening and reforming policy” was implemented. The inequality and inequity problems in urban life got even worse in China. When the number of laid-off and unemployed workers increased, the social security system was not yet in place, leading to a yearly rise in urban poverty. Besides that, the lack of resources and imbalanced distribution formed a terribly heavy burden of living on urbanite in Shanghai. Considering these problem which under the pretty surface of the big city, I try to use art to present the stressful urban life and the personality of urbanite.

When I was creating "the city" in my studio, I focused on the presentation of urban traffic systerm and define "time" in urban life. Two main elements I used were tubes and red ballons. They are symbols of these two main elements. The web of friend circle of a person is much bigger in urban than that in rural or small cities and the connected points are time and transportation systerm. The fast-paced and competition of urban life formed the specific way of communication and created complex transportation systerm. My work aims to figure out the formation of relationship in urban life and the initial reason behind this surface. Further more, I want to find the real me under the surface as an urbanite.

artists statement

I employ the human figure as a metaphor to probe socially related themes and try to perceive underlying connections that exist between seemingly disparate things. I have been examining hierarchies of power within social structures and how social structures are created, where they originate, and the way the social structures fluidly transition into one another as a means of sustaining themselves and expanding indefinitely. I’m interested in the way these structures embed themselves in unexpected places and the various forms that they take on. My aesthetic includes collecting my own drawings and paintings done in a variety of medium on different paper surfaces, and reassembling them with texts of my own that I collage together in layers. The approach becomes an extension of the content and process becomes integral to the end in the use of a variety of surfaces that become connected through the piece, the layering suggests the constant transformation of society and constant shifts of power at every level.