Life is full of surprises! A born rebel who looked upon marriage as something to be avoided, it turned out that in the fall of 2008 my girlfriend and I were joined in matrimony, and our daughter was born in 2009, an event which unavoidably had a great effect on my way of thinking. In retrospect, for a long time now my creative work has changed from the deconstruction of historical narrative to the expression of individual experience. This is a transformation of no small magnitude. The chance occurrences that one encounters in life inevitably leave me wondering if it has all been a dream.

Living in this floating world, it is inevitable that one will fall prey to emotion and sensory pleasures. As a young man I was heedless and wild. Before I knew it I had wasted many of the best years of my life, but after reaching my 40s I felt a nagging sense of regret. I can envision past events clearly before my eyes, but I was unable to undo my deplorable past. My aimless and self-indulgent way of life could provide no answers for the emptiness I felt. With this in mind, my “Dreamy” Series is a depiction of the longing of middle-aged men for the fleshly pleasures they knew in their youth. When I was newly married, I drew upon my own past love affairs as a template for creating the “Romance” Series. For this series, I studied the styles of traditional Chinese folk genre painting, erotic painting, painting executed with a ruler (jie hua), as well as calendar pictures before I painted these memorable and interesting life experiences as a memento to the dozens of love affairs in my past.

My current solo exhibition in Hong Kong is an expression of how I have felt recently. It is a description of traveling to different destinations in the company of my wife and daughter on our delightful honeymoon. Just as with classical photography, the patterned frame of my painting is a reflection of traditional geometric designs that have been well received today. I have therefore selected plain and elegant colors to express the atmosphere of simple but contented family life. Although the issue of a sweet burden of raising a daughter in mid-life is a more or less underlying theme in my paintings, bright colors have entered into my life and I have great expectations for the future. At this stage of my creative work, I have applied the styles of “micro-narrative” and “private diary” to incorporate elements of self-cultivation, together with the ineffable spirituality of traditional Chinese landscape painting, into the everyday world of married life. The beginning of a new phase in life thus arises from the fantastic landscapes of my painting…