Featured Painting – Anselm Kiefer’s Bathtubs

When artists strive to make things new, we can not and should not completely remove ourselves from the past or tradition. Often, the sediments of the past lend more meanings and poignancy to our new endeavors, or our new interpretations.

One of the greatest living artists Anselm Kiefer, is such an example who is steeped in tradition, and I was often moved by the historical resonances he brought forth to his monumental paintings, often through motifs connecting the past to the present, or the future. One of his striking paintings can be seen in SFMOMA, Unternehmen Seelöwe (Operation Sea Lion), placed a tin bathtub in a desolate field, containing several battleships. According to a curator, the manufacturer of those domestic bathtubs, was also manufacturer of weapons used in WWII by the Nazi armies. Such deft reference was a master stroke of Kiefer’s.



That painting, particularly its intriguing bathtub, left a strong impression on me, and it compelled me to record my understanding and imagination grew out of Kiefer’s motif, and led to a painting which I simply named as Anselm Kiefer’s Bathtubs, which was populated with several of such bathtubs in various planes and angles, as if floating on an open sea or in the space. Inside the central tub, a lonely-looking naked man hunched over and hugged his knees. The occupied bathtub, though surrounded by its “peers”, who were obviously in disagreement with one another, and rendered its lone occupier quite isolated and vulnerable.

Anselm Kiefer's Bathtubs
22” x 28”
Oil on Canvas
Completed in 2018
Such painting is also my tribute to a leading artist of our time.

Originally posted on matthewfelixsun.com


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The Innocents - Dedicated to the Victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17

The magnitude of the unspeakable tragedy of the downing of the civilian Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 by a mission in the war-torn region of eastern Ukraine was hard to fathom and absolutely cannot be accepted in a civil global society.  Everyone with righteous mind mourns the loss of near 300 people, on their way to return to their homes, to see their friends and families, to go to work, or to make holidays.

I was deeply touched by the tragedy and channeled my feeling into a gouache painting, commemorate this utterly senseless tragedy.


The Innocents - Dedicated to the victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17


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Featured Oil Painting "The Triumph of Saint George"

Just when the ill-conceived and ill-fated Iraq-invasion led by US president George W. Bush keeps and the prime minister of UK, Tony Blair, finally started to fade from our collective consciousness, it sprang back with vengeance in the tides of horrible stories and images.

Now, confronted with the terrifying aftermath of their reckless joint-decision, George W. Bush keeps mum, while Tony Blair tries desperately to white-wash his hands, yet however often he screamed "Out, damned spot! out, I say!", his hands, together with those of GWB's and Dick Cheney's, would forever be stained with blood, gushed from the mangled bodies of US soldiers and Iraqi people.

During his horrible and incompetent presidency, George W. Bush (GWB) was often criticized as an imbecile ninny occupying a high office due to his fabulous family connection - his father Georg Bush was the president of the US from 1989 to 1993. To me, that argument was incorrect and way too benevolent. GWB did many horrible things not due to his stupidity, but his fundamental believe in those horrible things.

To me, this painting of mine below, The Triumph of Saint George, created during the time he was drumming up the invasion of Iraq in 2003, reflects what he was; the painting also jump-started my ongoing Apocalypse Series, to commemorate the miseries of humankind.





I had hoped that what I depicted in that painting would be simply a warning sign, rather than, unfortunately, a most awful prophecy as it turned out. History will remember George W. Bush and Tony Blair, not kindly. As an artist, it was my duty to record and reflect the time I live in.

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How China Beats the U.S.

Globalization enabled corporations to cut costs, pay less salaries and pensions and reduce inventories.  Internet age made it much easier to have as low raw material inventory as possible.  The downside of this is that any interruption of the flow of the materials would cause chain-reactions down the pipe and all the way to the end users or consumers.

Take the flooding in Thailand for example.  American Public Media reported that "Thailand was such a key manufacturing base. It is a key point of transit for both computer parts -- hard drives in particular -- but also auto parts. It supplies other parts of the world but it also has assembly plants here; so in both cases in the auto industry.

"But also the parts shortage is causing big problems much further afield. In the United States and in Europe, for instance, Honda has had to cut production. Same with computer hard drives. Looking ahead towards the Christmas rush, there are already worries that they're just not going to be able to get the kind of parts they need. So it is a crucial hub in this region -- not just for Asia, but much further afield."

The earthquake and tsunami in Japan caused similar headache globally as well.

We'd better be prepared for such troubles in the future.  Overtly relying on the foreign suppliers, could be a security risk.

China, with its accumulating wealth, is heading to a clashing course with the U.S. headlong.  If these two countries are engaged in a war, China could beat the U.S. easily by withholding shipments of all those iProducts, such as iPhone, iPad, etc.

The inconsolable American consumers will storm our governments and pledge their allegiance to whoever would deliver their coveted goods and would be gladly to start to sing "The East is Red"!

[East is Red was a folk-song based ode to the great dictator Mao Zedong.]