My 2022 oil painting, Disperse, captures a hallucinatory moment of a nighttime landscape — between the silhouettes of two monumental and interlocking trees, a group of tiny figures scurrying by, running away from their familiar ground, their fates, their tormentors or captors. The specificities are intentionally omitted, so as to leave the viewers to interpret freely and to fill in the missing details, though the title does hint at diaspora stories in the headlines of late.
Disperse, oil on canvas, 20"x30", 2022
This piece will be part of the juried exhibition "Within Sight or From Imagination" at GearBox Gallery, 770 West Grand Ave, Oakland, CA 94612 (August 10 - September 9, 2023). Juror: Jeremy Morgan. Opening Reception: August 12, Sat., 1 to 4 pm | Juror’s talk: September 2, Sat., 2 pm
Dream Forest continued my exploration of monochromatic paintings consisting of interlocking patterns and shades, some simple, some more intricate. This small gouache painting depicted an imaginary forest at night time, when moon light shimmered over truncated trunks and branches, contrasting starkly with dark surrounding. Also, the image somehow resembled a microscopic view of organism, a tiny sliver of macrocosm.
Dream Forest
7” x 11”
Gouache on Paper
Completed in 2018
My 2015 painting Waft features, against an empty and nondescript landscape, a very small girl in the lower right corner of the vertical canvas, running away from the viewers, while holding strings tied to floating human balloons, all in the shape of young women dressed in pure white, in postures of awakening or drowning. Was it a hopeful dream, or a potentially nightmare? It is up to the viewers to decide. Perhaps, what I captured was the the hope and trepidation of a very young person at that cusp of growing into herself, while facing a future unknown.
Waft
Oil on Canvas
30" x 24"
Completed in 2015
This painting was chosen as cover art and as a featured piece on page 19 by Pomona Valley Review (Volume 11), published by California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, in July 2017.
My Mirage, a fantastic painting, was based on a vision visited me when I was falling asleep but with enough mental presence to get up to make quick notes – a distant town, whose outlines barely discernible, in the manner of those commonly seen in old Dutch or Flemish landscape paintings, overwhelmed by several enormous and boldly sketched black feathers floating above the sky. Behind those dark and somewhat ominous feathers, a delicately pretty pale blue sky flashed through persistently. Yet, despite the seemingly menace, those dark feathers also looked rather protective and comforting. A world of ambiguity.
My recent oil painting The March of Time was a chromatic piece, masking details with broad strokes, employing repetitive patterns to emphasis the underlying messages, and exploring the deep emotions with subtle tonal variation.
The painting depicted a wasted land - wreckage of houses in various degree of decay, scattered around a no-man’s land in spots where they once proudly stood but barely hanging on with ineffective supports of crutches and buttresses. This wasteland was the product of ruthless time, as manifested in the title; yet, it was hard not to think what humans, who once built and occupied those now abandoned structure, had contributed to this vast span of ruin.
The March of Time
Oil on Canvas
24" x 30"
Completed in 2016
Last year, a print and online review magazine, Owen Wister Review (University of Wyoming), planned to publish three works of mine: Stairwell, Rafting, and Ink and Watercolor Lilies. After much delay, the 2015 issue finally was published.
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From early June to late October, I will participate a group show, titled Crowded by Beauty, in McGuire Real Estate Office Gallery, Berkeley.
Below is information from the announcement by McGuire Real Estate:
I often found the Minotaur legend disturbing and strangely moving. Minotaur, the bull-headed monster, resided in the labyrinth built on the command of King Minos of Crete, subsisted on tributes of young boys and girls, and was finally slain by the Athenian hero Theseus, who invaded his lair as one of the new sacrifices.
The strangest aspect of the legend was that Minotaur had a head of a bull, which was not a natural carnivore, therefore it would not be far-fetched to imagine how sickened he was by his own savagery, thus I treated this subject in my oil painting, Minotaur.
My Minotaur was not a personification of usual monstrosity; rather, a sensitive being, trapped by his monstrous nature beyond his own control, he eagerly awaited his slayer/liberator, so as to rid himself of the misery.
Minotaur / 牛頭怪 / Minotaur
Oil on Canvas
24" x 30"
Completed in 2005
There, a hoof under his chin, my Minotaur pensively watched from a precipice the approaches of the Athenian boat, while holding the ball of threads, to be given to Theseus later by the willing princess Ariadne as means to aid his existing from the foul maze after the deed.
A large tear oozed out of his eye but it was not a bitter tear, rather a willing resignation and submission.
My landscape/allegorical oil painting, Shadow, depicts a fantastic world - a vast furrowed dark brown field, whose parallel ridges converge towards the distant horizon, which was dotted with a cluster of very insignificant white buildings, centering on a little church spire, which was barely visible. The contrast between the enormous dark fields and the tiny white village is highly dramatic, yet that is topped by several huge leaden and apparently weighty clouds, which curiously cast no shadows; instead, adds mysterious and menacing atmosphere, gliding over the entire field, s a huge shadow of an invisible bird, very much the personification of foreboding.
Shadow / 影子 / Schatten
Oil on Canvas
30″ x 40"
Completed in 2008
Interestingly, this painting just joined a group show, titled "In to the Future". Perhaps, this ominous world is the vision of the future?
In Distant Country / 在遙遠的国度 / In fernem Land Oil on Canvas
22″ x 28"
Completed in 2011
The left side of the painting, in shades of washed-out gray, depicts the Old St. John's Hospital, an 11th-century hospital in Bruges, Belgium while the right side zooms in one of the omnipresent swans and the symbol of that ancient city, painted in intensely saturated rich hues. I conceived this painting while visiting Bruges, when I was quite intrigued and even moved by the stark contrast of immobile and somewhat faded history and threadbare nobility, and the living creatures full of grace, energy and slight menace.
Furthermore, I named this title to ensure that the German title In fernem Land is the first line of the most celebrated aria by the title character in Wagner's opera Lohengrin, a mysterious knight arrived in a boat drawn by a swan, narrating his mythical original and his frustrated hope by lacking of faith he demanded from a woman he loved and rescued, whose child-ruler brother was turned into that swan and his disappearance had triggered a chain of events.
The medieval building and the medieval story interwoven, the purity and menace of this lofty bird, along with the historical baggage of Wagner, conspire to add extra meanings to this rather deceptively simply painting.
My painting, "Siege", currently on view at Berkeley's Arts Passage, in an exhibition titled "Today's Artists Interact with Major Art Movements from the Renaissance to the Present", is an almost terrifying work, depicting a wounded seabird being swamped by relentless, aggressive crabs. The painting was inspired by literature, which has played important role in my art making process, as documented in this guest blog on Superstition Review: "Literature Inspired Paintings".
Siege
Oil on Canvas
18" x 24"
Completed in 2010
While reading the novel Europe Central by William T. Vollman, I responded strongly to a passage (page 497): "Have you ever seen an injured bird at the seashore? Here come crabs from nowhere - they wait under the sand - and ring it round, cautiously at first, before you know it, the first crab has leapt onto the broken wing and pinched off a morsel. The bird struggles, but here come other crabs in a rush."
That passage, to me, summarized the helplessness of the Europe during World War II, which, viewed through historical magnifier, constitutes the distilled essence of human suffering.
The image conjured up by Vollman was translated onto canvas by my paint brush has made fairly strong impression on viewers.
My 2009 oil painting Progression, conceived and executed after our nation and the world had suffered the dark era of George W. Bush, and entered an epoch ought have ushered in some changes in the U.S. following the ascendency of President Obama. Alas. It was not to be. Many people's feverish hope proved constructed from thin air, and the changes were ever elusive, and the human rights abuses we collectively permitted largely remain in place. The long list of human sufferings continue.
My painting attempted to catalog such sufferings in a collage of iconography images, from Jesus carrying the cross to Calvary, Michelangelo's slave sculpture, David's Liberty Leads People, and the hooded abused prisoner in Abu Ghraib. The focal point of the painting is the sad face of an earnest man, personification of the sorrows and compassion of humankind.
Progression
Oil on Canvas
30" x 24"
Completed in 2009
My most accomplished painting to date is a portrait of an old woman, Grandma (2003), while its companion painting, Liberation Road (2010), is my most personal one.
Liberation Road / 解放路 / Befreiungstraße
Oil on Canvas
18" x 24"
Completed in 2010
This painting was based on a photo of my paternal great great grandmother, or maybe great grandmother, I do not really know for sure. She was a very elegant woman with a knowing look and her photo had often haunted me and caused me to wonder what had happened to her, to her family, to her descendants in the ensuring years - all those endless upheavals, wars, famine - human suffering of all kinds, from the end of the imperial time, the republican era and culminated in the so-called revolution in the mid-twentieth century. Furthermore, this painting also touched on the traumatic experiences my parents and my sibling and myself suffered in the iron grip of the Chinese Communist Party, or any totalitarian regime, even to this very day.
The left side of the painting showed ruined houses and railroads, balancing the right side of the portrait of my dignified grandmother. The horizontal road sign bisecting the painting read "Liberation Road", yet at the end of the arrow, we saw a sorrow-stricken person, helplessly rested his/her head on the knees, anything but liberated. There was a similar figure, at the lower right of the painting, echoing this figure, in the same posture, though in profile.
I made this painting to pay tribute to my elegant ancestors who had striven to achieve personal enlightenment and successes and later suffered precisely for their achievements in the hands of the anti-intellectual and self-righteous puritanical Communist Party. By surrounding my great grandmother with ruins and other suffering people, I tried to demonstrate the scope of the destruction in the wake of the Communist Party.
In order to show both the complete picture and its details as the "camera" panning across the canvas, I incorporated two video clips into one single final video and they can be played simultaneously. I deliberately kept my left clip static, so as to show the complete painting, while the right clip demonstrate the details, exactly as the video above.
I have always been drawn to the complex, intensely humane and deeply flawed characters in Greek mythology, and have made several paintings of based on several such figures, e.g. Minotaur, Daphne and Apollo, Helen of Troy, and Oedipus, etc.
One of my such efforts was an oil painting on the theme of Orpheus, one of the most famous musicians in human history, conceived while I was reading Rainer Maria Rilke's Die Sonette an Orpheus.
That subject was a dangerous ground to tread into, because there were so many wonderful artworks had been created after this Orpheus myth, from paintings to operas; yet the lure of this myth and the reinterpretation by Rilke was so strong and irresistible, I pressed on.
My Orpheus was a collage of many variations of the much-told myth. My painting started with his descend into Hades to seek his beloved Eurydice, traveling on the River Styx. His lyre, which had persuaded Hades and Persephone to let Eurydice return to the earth, dominated the canvas. The lyre also took a shape of a strange animal, and was also a linkage to Apollo. After he had lost Eurydice for the second time, the grief driven Orpheus refused to entertain Dionysus' followers who in their rages ripped him to pieces. His skull became an oracle and his flesh and bones were tossed into sky, scattered about and filled the universe with his music.
Thus the marriage of Apollonian and Dionysian spirits ushered in a new era.
The Song of Orpheus / 奧菲厄斯的歌 / Das Lied des Orpheus
Oil on Canvas
30" x 24"
Completed in 2010
I saw Orpheus as the means to bring joy and meaning to the world, through his irrepressible quest for love and his suffering, and ultimately his death. I saw his lyre singing and I saw his bones being scattered into the highest sphere, just like his notes would have crowned the heaven. Holy ointment burned in his skull, which had transformed into an oracle, rising up to dance with his ever higher notes. That's The Song of Orpheus.
I am very proud of my 2007 oil painting "Mackerel", in which I managed to capture both beautiful and sinister elements of a daily object, fulfilling a most tantalizing pursuit of mine.
With its intense colors and bold strokes, this painting economically presents a sleekly fish, intently staring upwards, as if ready to confront its captor; at the meanwhile, its eye also betrayed the fish's sad resignation to its imminent demise.
The background of the painting was plain drop cloth, hatched lightly, and dominated by sickly greenish-yellow from the left and graduated to an intense blue to the right. The intense vertical blue patch also represents the deep water being turned upright, in a disorientated world.
Mackerel
Oil on Canvas
28" x 22"
Completed in 2007
It was also selected for exhibition at ViewPoint 2009, 41st Annual National Juried Art Competition, Cincinnati Art Club, Ohio, November 2009.
This painting was included in two-person show at Trilogy Studio, San Francisco, 2011, and it was exhibited at Artist-Xchange Gallery, San Francisco, in 2009.
I don't consider myself as a colorist; yet, sometimes, I managed to utilize some vibrant colors to create paintings with vibrant colors, bold, striking, yet harmonious, such as my 2003 oil painting, Birds and Men.
Birds and Men / 鳥與人 / Vögel und Menschen
Oil on Canvas
30" x 40"
2003
With that painting, and several others made in 2003, I started my Apocalypse Series, intended to document human sufferings inflicted by reckless or repressive political, religious or cultural forces. The direct impetus to create such series was the impending invasion of Iraq, led by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell, et. al.
As stated in my standard bio: "Life is a harsh experience, yet it is beautiful. Art ought to be from life, and above life. To merely document surfaces is not enough: I want to grasp what is behind, which to me is far more compelling and worthwhile.
As with many artists, my early work is grounded in realism, and evolved into a style that retains a representative cast but rejects slavish naturalism. I immerse myself in the patterns and rhythms of forms, particularly the contradiction between the surface beauty and harsh subjects, and from these foci has formed a distinctive style. The subject matter of my work ranges from portraiture and landscape/cityscape, to allegories and abstraction."
Last week, I shipped to Seattle my 2008 oil painting, Upstream, which has been selected for the juried show, 2014 Evergreen Association of Fine Arts (EAFA) Open Exhibition, at EAFA Gallery in the Seattle Design Center (5701 Sixth Avenue South, Suite P292, Seattle, WA 98108).
This modest painting, measured 24" by 18", semi-abstract in style, clearly influenced by Chinese ink painting, depicts a fish or two struggles to swim upstream, against the current. It is fitting for the painting to travel to Seattle, because it was in that city when I witnessed an amazing salmon run in Chittenden Locks Fish Ladder several years ago.
This painting was not a frank documentation of that fish ladder scene; rather, when I painted it, I was trying to capture a free spirit, a spirit to overcome adversaries. I deliberated chose a black and white color scheme, and a bold, almost abstract outline, as I was mostly interested in something elemental, less representational.
This work surely has a charmed life and earned a fair bit of recognitions - in 2009, it was published in The William and Mary Review by The College of William and Mary, Virginia, Volume 47.
2002 was a year in which I mostly concentrated in painting portraits, plus a couple of landscape/cityscape commissions - W. Park and Via Italia.
Working on commissions were quite challenging, a bit terrifying and also strangely satisfying. Ego massaging? Perhaps. But the most satisfying part was the joy and happiness the commissioners demonstrated upon the deliveries of the works. I would love to do some commissioned portraits. My dear readers, your selfies can never compete with a timeless oil portrait for classiness.
The most satisfying work from 2002 was a group portrait, Interaction, which captured the spirit of the then Chinese
collage students, who were facing very uncertain futures, in the age of
political corruption and crackdown around the time of 1989 Tian’anmen (Tiananmen) Massacre and a very harsh economic reality.
Below is the video presentation of oil paintings I completed in 2002:
Music excerpt TimeSphere by Steven Yi
Completed: 2013.07.27
Duration: 7:03
Ensemble: Electronic (blue, Csound)
I've uploaded this video to my YouTube channel long ago but missed to post it here.
Year of 2009 was not very productive year for me, perhaps, I was affected by the economic downturn, as most Americans keenly felt. Year of 2009 was also a year of broken hope to many, therefore, my most significant work produced in 2009 was the painting "House of Hope", featuring the broken promises:
If I have to summarize my career as an artist, I would say that the
biggest achievement I’ve attained was the creation of my portrait
painting “Grandma”.
Grandma
Oil on Canvas
40″ x 30″
Completed in 2003
This painting, created during the time when George W. Bush was
drumming up to invade Iraq, despite the series opposition from the
people within and without the US.
At the time, I was reading Günter Grass’s fantastic novel The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel),
and was struck by a passage depicting the a protagonist’s old peasant
grandma, whose presence in the novel, though not frequent, but
impressive, due to the wonderful depiction of the author of her at
various phases of her long life – many layers of her skirts, her peeling
potatoes, the heated bricks she used to stay warm, again, underneath her layers of skirts.
I have painted several portraits of old women. To me, they often can be categorized as sibyl,
a word comes (via Latin) from the Greek word σίβυλλα sibylla, meaning
prophetess. Old women are the personifications of mysterious wisdom and
deep compassion, and the grandma in The Tin Drum was the personification of just that.
To generate a working-class and wise woman, I gave her a pair of
large knotting hands and wrinkled face, and emphasized her stiff
posture, against the equally thinly painted menacing sky, and somewhat
comforting trees, whose monumentality again gave the grandma an air of a
Greek goddess, all seeing, compassionate, and formidable.
After having created two well-received gouache paintings, Yellow Rose and Sunflower, I continued my exploration with this versatile media.
It seemed natural that I would want to try out as many hues as possible as a beginner, and below one can see a newly finished gouache painting, Wildflowers, based on a colorful photo, taken in my home city, Shenyang:
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