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Song Dong talks about ‘Sheng’ …. the concept that “everything is in constant development, a kind of continuation”. I interpret this idea as ‘flux’, ‘change’ or ‘evolution’. These terms can be distilled into one word… ‘time’. My vocabulary comes from both my personal and cultural experience. It is steeped in the processes of the natural world that I have studied and longed to understand. As my life evolves, so does the complex mental framework I use to understand the world and myself. My own art is the most important way I express these insights. I am comfortable with the ambivalence of art. It is necessary because it reminds me that life is neither black or white but always grey… always in complex patterns. Art can teach us that nothing is simple… everything is layered with the past and there is so much we need to yet discover that is not obvious at first glance. We may look to art for many things such as… holding onto joy and beauty, confronting pain and loss, or slowing the relentlessness of time with all it removes and all it offers. Art is about life. Life cannot be without change. Art captures our individual experience of moments in time and then it can become a collective idea. It is difficult to draw a boundary between the personal and the social… it’s all a mash-up. I want to end with another Song Dong quote: ‘We paint something, we write something, because we want to remember it’ What do you want to remember? Contact me here with you answer.
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