Rows of repeated figures on the canvas are the imprint that observing reality has left on me over many years.
Watching this era — crowds gathering and dispersing, lives rising and falling, people behaving alike and wearing the same expressions — I see countless individuals carried along by the current of their time. Homogenisation strikes me as one of the most visible spiritual conditions of this period. I have chosen the repeated human figure as my pictorial sign: row upon row of similar faces forming the ground tone of a collective consensus. Within that uniformity there appears, from time to time, the one who is different — carrying a pink umbrella, wearing a singularly coloured coat, showing an emotion that belongs only to him: weeping, looking out, or holding a conspicuous posture. This is the question I bury in the painting: when a crowd moves in a single pattern, where can the soul still be placed?
In the works of 2018 I set the figures on the surface of water. People dine, walk, sit and paint in the water. Water is unstable reality, the moving current of the age; all of us are inside it, with no solid ground beneath our feet, living and talking and keeping up daily life in an uncertain environment. The calm, vast expanse of sea and sky stands in contradiction to the weightlessness of the figures. Through this surreal scene I try to describe the suspended, unsettled state of modern inner life — the sense of being unable to change one's circumstances.
Another series takes children as its subject: tender faces dressed in identical clothes, arranged into orderly ranks. Some hold toys, some cry aloud, some walk on in silence. Living children are wrapped in a uniform shell; innocence collides with discipline. Through these images I think about growth, assimilation, and the process by which individual nature is shaped by its surroundings — and about how every ordinary person, from earliest childhood, is already placed inside the question of the group.
The restrained grey tonality is a deliberate visual choice. I try to strip the painting of strong emotional colour, using flat realism to construct a deliberately absurd scene. An occasional green coat, a pink umbrella, a purple dress — these are the individual's faint breakout. I have no wish to criticise; I only lay the mirror of what I feel onto the canvas: collective and individual, conformity and singularity, drifting and rooted.
These paintings hold no answers. They are a long, steady look at my own perception.
By painting similar crowds again and again I am not trying to reproduce monotony. I only hope that among the thousands of repeated faces the viewer will find the one figure that is different, and see the contradiction that lives in each of us: we long to belong to the group and be safe, and we instinctively want to keep the soul that is ours alone.
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Studio — Beijing, China