Prelude

Chinese Opera art is a highly audience-oriented art form that originated from lives, its stories carry certain historical references in Chinese history and have been serving rural farmers, literati and scholars, and the royal families for a long time.

The artist’s inspiration is rooted in her research of the HK Cantonese Opera Costumes history and its material culture, where her family heritage belongs. Her belief in somatic history carries the cultural marks of one’s DNA origin to be manifested in spiritual and physical life to execute the power of the narrative. Her works question the existing cultural conflict, boundaries, and exclusivity through the exploration of the various form of this particular Chinese intangible cultural heritage into a visual narrative for the spectators to investigate the dichotomy between formality and freedom, natural and artificial, ancient and contemporary.

Given the narrative value of the material culture, patterns like the blessing bat, the healing Hulu, and the auspicious cloud exist as metaphysical living entities since ancient history and stands for cultural languages, belief structures, and identity politics that lie beyond their verbal and visual language that holding onto a realm that isn’t ordered by syntax but illustrates a more fluid and nebulous state where meaning is never secured but endlessly pursued, suspended, or delayed. The artist’s concern is to reconstruct to describe the artistic vision and make visible the way these non-neutral interfaces will contribute to the imperishable cultural imaginary and elucidation to render the absurdity of the present situation.

Her “East meets West, Old into New” elevates one’s expectation of traditional art, and extended from oneself to all nations. Incorporating the format of traditional Chinese painting, landscape, and stories, presenting with the western perspective, painting technique, and medium, opening a door into the surreal yet sacred sanctuary, relating the present and future as an extension of the gendered self that the self and the pattern are one to decipher the gendered self to entertain doubt in interrogating its contextual approaches and identity policies. But what relevance it will implicate in a broader social and cultural context?

If art is about life, stories reveal life, and her artwork engages an ongoing self-regeneration process, a connection, and extension of ancient and contemporary, mundane to spiritual, that leads to a deeper reflection and conversation on one’s perception of life. When the unorthodox verve reveals on the artist’s canvas transcended through the dynamic expressions in colors, form, texture, and composition, the paintings become an open yet intimate dialogue between them and the spectators, through which, all states of mind are possible.