Eethereal "Immaculate"
“Immaculate” aptly summarizes its subject of the painting – several ethereal white lilies floating in an opaque water body, whose pattern resembles the other-worldly images transmitted by the great Hubble Space Telescope. These dreamily floating flowers and their irregularly patterned background, mesmerize and pull the viewers into the depth.
This painting was published by
Recently I created an installation Wilting Flowers and fully documented the creation and installation processes.
This new effort was spurred by my continued fascination with paper
material – delicate, malleable, and transitory, characteristics well
suited for hinting at, versus representing, a world full of fragility
and vulnerability, constantly under the threat of total destruction.
My local newspaper, “The San Francisco Chronicle”, served as the
foundation: a segment of our time, distilled and encapsulated. Inky
strokes and splashes were added to the newspaper sheets, which were
folded and tied up to form large flowers, with aluminum wires wrapped
with dyed twine as stems.
For the background, I chose five sheets of plain white paper,
streaked with similar black strokes of ink diluted with various amount
of water.
To install, I attached these background paper to a wall in an uneven
row, then affixed those flowers, 13 total, to those sheets. There were
no strict rules about how to lay out the background sheets and flowers,
as long as the finished installation looked balanced, and the flowers
largely faced outwards.
I have installed these sheets and flowers on different surfaces – a
colorful graffitied plywood wall, or somber looking wooden fences, at
different times of the day. The differences between the surfaces, the
different light cast on the wall or fence, background sheets and paper
flowers, all contributed to a murmuring polyphony.
Wilting Flowers
Ink on paper and newspaper, aluminum wire, cotton string
40" x 140" x 5"
Completed in 2016
Spring time is so lovely and I was enchanted by the yellow roses in my building:
While enjoying these, I remembered some pictures I took in my office, yellow and red cactus. I don't think that they are flowers but surely they are just as beautiful:
It should be raining in San Francisco Bay Area in this time of year, yet it rains almost every other day. When it rains, I have to walk instead of riding my bicycles to work, for safety's sake. The benefit of such walk is that I can observe many beautiful things carefully, instead of just let them fly by.
Yesterday was such a walking day and I took some pictures to document what I saw. There were many flowers in Berkeley now - glamorous or humble, plain or unusual:
Beauty exists not only in fanciful colors, but also plain:
Even the most impersonal building blocks had some melancholic allure:
However, I was always glad to be back in nature:
And to top it all, to encounter a lovely feline, who didn't give me any due attention. Cat!
And this beautiful scene was definitely a fitting finale for such a day:
It is hard to believe that twenty-two years have passed since that fateful fourth of June. It was a most disturbing day I've ever lived and but the memory of it was rather hazy now. Perhaps, I have tried to suppress the trauma?
I cannot help wondering now that since that day, how many people have passed away and how many have been born. How many still have memories of that day or any knowledge of it at all and how many have totally forgotten or are ignorant of it?
How many have become richer and how many poorer? How many have lost their humanity, courage, conscious and reason and how many have traded their innocence for advancement?
How many have been troubled by conscious and how many remained gleeful of the pain of the others? How many have been trying to remember and remind and how many have tried to erase any trace of it from their own minds and history? How many have been mute and how many have been speaking with almost no audience?
I do not know. Probably I will never know. In the end, i hardly matters. What matters is that someone will remember and remind.
It is raining in Berkeley, California - unseasonable and unreasonable - rationality seems to do not belong to this day. I have nothing to offer, except for my dimming memory and some images of flowers - pictures of flowers in May - to the suffering souls.
I just finished a still life painting, which is almost abstract in style, titled "Thorned Flowers".
This painting was inspired by Vincent van Gogh's Almond Blossom, a painting influenced by Japanese woodcut, with its delicate pale sky and boldly outlined branches and thick impasto petals. Ever since saw it in Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, the image haunted me time to time, particularly when I drifted in and out of my dreams. One of those moments propelled me to capture a fleeting image I saw - a fields of pink peach flowers, which I was very familiar with because they populated a main boulevard in the city I grew up, delicate yet persistent, brilliantly offset by an intense blue sky. For me, however, this beautiful image is not readily to be reached. It would be separated by a row of rude black barb wires, either preventing the beauty's escaping from its tyranny, or preventing suitors' reaching their desired objects.
Van Gogh's painting was a fairy tale. My painting tries to present a sad reality:
Thorned Flowers
Oil on Canvas
18" x 24"
Completed in 2010
In 1997, I did a small still life - Irises. I was satisfied enough and even framed it.
More than ten years later, it looked just too flat as if it was painted by number. While taking time to finish new pieces, I took advantage of downtime and re-worked on this little one. Several months time passed since I started to re-paint it and finally, I finished it today.
It must be the spring season. I couldn't believe that I just finished off another flower painting. I've been blogging about flowers, flowers, and flowers - I think I am losing my mind.
After all these, I was ready to take a break from flowers. But, one day, on my way home from subway, I saw two lilies on the roadside, just below the curb. They were still largely intact, except for one or two bent petals, which seemed were melting into the gray pavement. Immediately, a picture conjured up to my mind and I decided to paint it.
Unsatisfied with my memory, I went back to the scene but those two flowers were driven over multiple times and utterly destroyed. Once a local flower shop opened, I rushed in and bought a stem with two blooms. Rapidly, frenetically, I smeared painted on the canvas, and within a week, I finished the project. Now I'm enjoying my painting and my lilies - four blooms now!
Two flower paintings of mine - "Red Flowers" and "Flowers in Blue Vase" and will be included in the Spring Garden Theme Show at Artist Xchange Gallery, San Francisco in March 2010. The opening reception is on the 5th of March, 7-10 pm.
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