Nightmare/2023
During this year, I always have nightmares. In my nightmares, the surroundings all come from my daily life. Each character has a sense of order. When I first get into these dreams, I feel that I am experiencing my real life. However, sometimes the monstrous scenes remind me that I am still in the dream. It’s very hard to wake myself up from the nightmare, but when I am awake, I notice my life in a unfamiliar city is another kind of nightmare. Fictional dream and real life become mirror images. I would like to use elements from reality to illustrate the story in my nightmare.
I set up some quirky elements in daily life and then capture them to create a sense of walking into my nightmare. The continuous and repeated elements lead viewers to walk into a maze. On the other hand, the painted works use another language to illustrate my intuitive feeling in my dream. Both of these two medias are trying to express my loneliness through my dream. Art provides me a form of language to get close to viewers.
I set up some quirky elements in daily life and then capture them to create a sense of walking into my nightmare. The continuous and repeated elements lead viewers to walk into a maze. On the other hand, the painted works use another language to illustrate my intuitive feeling in my dream. Both of these two medias are trying to express my loneliness through my dream. Art provides me a form of language to get close to viewers.
Girl Rooms/2022
This project's perspective is from girls who have the same background as me. While they have been educated abroad, once they come back, they have to face the reality that deeply challenges their beliefs. Frustrated by unqualified partners who could not share their views, and hoping to find accompaniment, those girls are frequent users of online dating websites and apps. The new obstacles they face include being regarded as sexual preys and labelled just as they were in real patriarchal life.
American contemporary artists like Justin Kurland and Katy Grannan offer me great inspirations. Individuality and inner thoughts were most shown when subject matters are alone. Each photo is created like a shot from film in a tableau-vivant style. Such style liberates my subject matters from the limited spaces they are in as it gives them a dramatic effect like characters on the stage of a theater. Saturated colors pump out of surfaces like ripe fruits, a vivid visual effect amplified by dreamy, childish props. Yet the models’ mature styling reminds us of their real ages and how ridiculous this setting is going to be.
American contemporary artists like Justin Kurland and Katy Grannan offer me great inspirations. Individuality and inner thoughts were most shown when subject matters are alone. Each photo is created like a shot from film in a tableau-vivant style. Such style liberates my subject matters from the limited spaces they are in as it gives them a dramatic effect like characters on the stage of a theater. Saturated colors pump out of surfaces like ripe fruits, a vivid visual effect amplified by dreamy, childish props. Yet the models’ mature styling reminds us of their real ages and how ridiculous this setting is going to be.
Animal World/2021
The performance project further explores redefined power dynamics in online dating culture.
The reversal of gender roles is inspired by an online service called ‘virtual lover’ which similarly reverses the conventional power dynamics in real world. Set in an animal world where the strong eat the weak, male characters are asked to perform as rabbits, whose naivety and innocence makes them easy preys of more powerful forces. The tracing of camera is one of those forces with a controlling and surveilling quality.
The reversal of gender roles is inspired by an online service called ‘virtual lover’ which similarly reverses the conventional power dynamics in real world. Set in an animal world where the strong eat the weak, male characters are asked to perform as rabbits, whose naivety and innocence makes them easy preys of more powerful forces. The tracing of camera is one of those forces with a controlling and surveilling quality.
