works
paintworks






? My days began at 5:30 each morning. I would first look to the eastern horizon, searching for the faintest glimmer of light signaling the coming dawn. If the weather seemed clear, I would turn my gaze to the temple, glowing to the rising sunlight. The brightness of the temple often revealed how clear the air would be that day. Shanghai, during the winter, is often clear due to the prevailing pressure patterns. Only after this observation did I turn my attention to paintings, which had been resting through the cold night.

The gold of the temple seemed to shimmer and shed light upon the visions of a vague past.

Had I chosen to include every dream and vision, paintings become forever incomplete. They were a kind of observational and delusional apparatus, at times paradoxical, but the observations only began once the work itself was complete.

This realization brings me to Hume, skepticism about causality and empiricism echoing through my approach. Hume would argue that what we perceive as "laws" of nature are merely habitual associations between events. The observation of light refracting through surfaces, the patterns of color, and their subsequent reproduction in my paintings—none of these observations can lead us to a definitive conclusion about the "true" nature of light or color. We are simply observing phenomena as they present themselves, and any deeper meaning is a construct of the mind. I embrace this uncertainty, leaving space for the subjective experience of color and scapes to transcend the rigid frameworks that science imposes.

One morning, while observing the band of blues, I looked away and saw yellow on the wall, a phenomenon as described by Goethe. It made me reflect on the tension between perception and reality, between form and void.  But am I  more concerned with the experience of visions? Much in line with Heidegger’s notion of *Dasein*. The technical understanding of light is one thing, but what does it mean to *be* in the presence of light and color? Our experience of the world is always contextual and interpretive, never purely objective. The paintings seeked to express not just the technical splitting of light but also the phenomenological experience—the process of how color and light reflect scapes emerges as we engage with it, shaping our sense of being.

Every morning in the clear winter light of Shanghai, I found myself immersed in colors. This tension between something substantial and something evasive consistently drew me to paint. The warmth joined by hands, the mind, and fan accompanies the elusive gaze on reality.
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