清明 QING MING
2022
Mixed Media
Installation
Tools
︎︎︎ Fire
︎︎︎ Paper
︎︎︎ Canvas
Presented at the Chan Gallery of Pomona College as part of the 2022 Senior Art Show.
I grew up in Shanghai. As a child, the only times I ever got to get close to fire was during Qingming Festival. Every year, my family drove to my grandfather’s tomb on a nameless hill in Zhejiang. We would burn money and gifts made of paper and talk to him for hours. I used to stare at the dancing flames until my eyes are filled with tears - less from sadness, more from the smoke. I wondered how the gifts would ever reach him. I wondered how we would ever know if he said anything in return.
Since then, fire has fascinated me as a medium of communication, one that connects the physical with the spiritual. It is gentleness and warmth, pain and mourning, meditation and introspection, freedom and energy.
Fire is both the subject and medium of my series of drawings and installations. I give way to the element and let it control my process and results. I record and document its movements and interactions with traditionally painterly surfaces, compiling the burnt marks and edges into both truthful and ambiguous forms. Through references of traditional Chinese imageries in painting and calligraphy, I explore my relationship with my familial and cultural lineage through processes reminiscent of the meditative experience of observing the dynamics flames.
I grew up in Shanghai. As a child, the only times I ever got to get close to fire was during Qingming Festival. Every year, my family drove to my grandfather’s tomb on a nameless hill in Zhejiang. We would burn money and gifts made of paper and talk to him for hours. I used to stare at the dancing flames until my eyes are filled with tears - less from sadness, more from the smoke. I wondered how the gifts would ever reach him. I wondered how we would ever know if he said anything in return.
Since then, fire has fascinated me as a medium of communication, one that connects the physical with the spiritual. It is gentleness and warmth, pain and mourning, meditation and introspection, freedom and energy.
Fire is both the subject and medium of my series of drawings and installations. I give way to the element and let it control my process and results. I record and document its movements and interactions with traditionally painterly surfaces, compiling the burnt marks and edges into both truthful and ambiguous forms. Through references of traditional Chinese imageries in painting and calligraphy, I explore my relationship with my familial and cultural lineage through processes reminiscent of the meditative experience of observing the dynamics flames.
