Childhood Memories

When I was a child, I spent a lot of time around my grandmother. Sometimes, whenever she got together with a few other old women from the neighborhood, she would open up a thread-bound book with yellowish pages and sing out laud old famous stories: emperors and kings, the royal and the wicked, the heroes and beauties. It was mesmerizing. My father was a director of a middle school in the countryside. It was probably towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, when I was around ten, that I saw old books accumulated in his office waiting to be destroyed. At that time, people were urged to turn in books deemed bad - feudalist, reactionary, or poisonous. I could not help looking at some of them; I had no idea what they were, but I remember seeing some very old, beautiful picture stories that I really wanted to steal some but did not dare to. In my mind, thread-bound Chinese books always carry something mysterious and forbidden.

Books and Destruction of Books, History and Memory

Rows of sleeping books on the shelf of a library first appeared in my paintings in 1993. "The Library Series" is an ongoing project. I see books as a material form of something abstract. In most of these paintings, you don't see authors or titles; only traces of categorization and organization left by librarians. Books were presented as containers whose content seemed inaccessible; the spines of books form an impenetrable wall in front of the viewer. I am not so interested in books as a symbol of knowledge, education or enlightenment; it is the endless accumulation of documents, and the almost toxic air of decay that fascinates me. I am more interested in the feeling of absence, impermanence and loss in these images. The accumulation of books has an architectural presence. I focus on their quality as ruins.

In the "Chinese Library Series", I've painted thread-bound Chinese books with worm-eaten pages. In fact I was once referred to in an exhibition review as a bookworm. A bookworm who is always "digging into stacks of old papers"(zuan gu zhi dui), I have a long-standing interest in time, memory, and history - a thread which runs through my work. While I continued to paint Chinese and Western books, I also started in 1994 to make installations based on documentation of historical events; some of them have to do with the destruction of books, such as "Nocturne: Burning of Books by the Nazis" (1995) and "Order(The Red Guards)"(1999). My recent project "The MoMA Library" (2005-06), also deals with history: it engages very specific art-historical references.

Paintings of Newspapers: A Fragmentary View

Eventually my subjects expand to include newspapers. "The Silent Flow of Daily Life" (1998 to present) is a series of paintings that depict newspaper stacks found on the shelves as arranged by librarians, usually marked or labeled with dates. What interests me most is the temporary nature of this mundane everyday object loaded with the all-encompassing information of changing daily life: from the front-page news to stock market columns to birth announcements and obituaries. Newspapers are recycled. Life goes on. In some paintings, the abstract pattern on the side of a stack gives away no specific information. At times, the close-up view of the newspaper stack reveals fragmented news pictures and texts of seemingly unrelated events, from the quiet passage of the everyday, to the disturbing conflicts and tragedies of our time. The accidental juxtaposition of images and texts suggests, and at the same time conceals a larger, more complex social picture. This is perhaps our perception of the world in the media age: a bombardment of discrete bits of data - superficial, fragmented, and quite often, literally "warped".

In some paintings from the series, you can find images of the ruins of the World Trade Center, the besieged compound of Arafat, and the spectacle of the day and night bombing of Baghdad. What can you say, among the silenced voices, in the face of what's happening every day? Nothing comes as a shock really. In the newspaper paintings, I am trying to find a way to combine my ideas and interests in the earlier "Library Series" paintings of decaying books and installations dealing with historical events, in a simple format.

"The Leaders": Ink Paintings Based on News Images

My most recent ink paintings explore a different way of responding to the news images saturated in our daily life. I attempt to transform the news photos into ink washes and strokes that suggest fleeting memories. In early and mid 20th century, Chinese artists who had studied in the west, such as Xu Beihong, Lin Fengmian and Wu Guanzhong, were obsessed with the idea of reinventing the thousand-year-old tradition of ink painting by combing it with influences from Western art. Their approaches have been mostly stylistic and aesthetic. In my recent ink paintings, the immediacy of ink and wash on rice paper conceptually parallels the fast pace of news images; technically, I experiment with special effects by using laminated rice paper and an ink resistant mineral solution to create high-lights without using opaque paint. The result is a look that has the lyrical quality of traditional ink and wash but at the same time maintains a reference to documentary photography, a style that is not recognized immediately as Chinese or Western. The experiment of ink painting has recently begun to inform my oil painting on canvas.