"If the exhibition traces my works between 2005 and 2011, then the “Time Window” series documents my recollection and reconstruction of my entire childhood experience, while the “Tempera” series is the construction of an imaginary world of my current frame of mind, on the basis of further studies in pictorial language and technique.

However, as I reorganize the “West 9-301” — works between 1983 and 1988, and between 2005 and 2011— for exhibition purpose, I find it difficult to explain them with simple language.

Intuitively, the paintings of the past twenty-eight years have never departed from the lingual or narrative recurrence of events on the two-dimensional plain, only the paintings done when I was five were completed with life (I no longer remember under what circumstances they were created, and what is left on paper is the chaos and unexplainable facts of the origins of life); the paintings done after I went to school were painted with my organs (hand) or thinking (brain).

Throughout the exhibition process, linked by pictorial documentation, I start to wonder if there is a unique aesthetic standard in painting. Apart from modal exploration, do paintings convey, in their conceptual expressions, jocular beckoning, mysterious realization, the deceit of destiny and the light of life? Does the significance of painting lie in the painting process itself or the end result of it? To go one step further, since paintings are the pictorial expressions of life, when life has changed, is what remains of me in the painting real or is the original me real? In an age when painting has been marginalized, is it possible to hold on to ideals? (I love my paintings and will paint whatever I like).

This exhibition is individualized. I wish to use “West 9-301” as a spatial coordinate, and to rediscover and salvage myself through painting, so as to understand what journeys other people go through in life. The exhibition authentically reflects my predicament when searching for the journeys (unease, fear, confusion and anxiety)."

- MA Nan