SpectralArchive

My practice begins with a question that stays open: what can a work do before meaning has settled?

We live in a time that demands quick positioning: art is expected to declare, to summarise, to land. But I have found that arriving at a position too fast can turn making into a form of slogan-production. What I want, instead, is to extend the time before meaning becomes fixed. This is both a methodological discipline and a kind of courtesy toward the world.

I call this attitude grayscale. Grayscale is not ambiguity as failure, nor the absence of position; it is a respect for complexity: an acknowledgement that cognition has limits, that emotion moves, and that judgment requires the slow sedimentation of time. I do not pursue visual consistency. What stays stable is my way of understanding: across painting, mixed media, screenprint, and digital image-making, my work maintains a methodological commitment to delayed judgment, to not yet deciding.

This way of working is also rooted in personal experience. Growing up with a physical difference in my right hand made me aware very early that ideas of perfection, symmetry, and normality are often produced through the way bodies are looked at. It shaped my attraction to blurred images, broken surfaces, misalignment, and incomplete forms. For me, clarity does not necessarily equal truth, and imperfection is not something that needs to be corrected.

My cultural experience enters the work in a similarly layered way. Historical objects, family memories, fragments of Chinese visual culture, old photographs, contemporary screens, and degraded digital images can coexist within the same work. I am interested in what happens when different systems of time and meaning meet: when something inherited is placed beside something immediate, or when an old image passes through contemporary technologies of compression, scanning, and circulation. Rather than using cultural references as fixed symbols, I allow them to shift, accumulate, and be read differently in the present.

The face appears repeatedly in my work, but never as a stable marker of identity. It functions as a dynamic interface, carrying traces of emotion, duration, cultural memory, and the weight of being looked at. I am also in continuous dialogue with materials: some are used to seal time and freeze a moment inside matter; others openly admit their own disappearance, warping, or erosion. These impulses are not contradictory. They approach the same question from different sides: how matter carries time.

Image degradation, the wear of materials, the residue of repair, and the unevenness of an edge are not failures in my practice. They are the method. They keep the work open and resist its collapse into a single, complete meaning. This openness also allows different viewers to enter the work from different positions. A historical object may carry one memory for me and another association for someone else; a damaged face may be read through identity, technology, ageing, migration, memory, or bodily experience. I am interested in that gap between what I bring to the work and what another person brings to it.

For me, this is where dialogue can happen across different generations and cultural backgrounds: not because everyone reaches the same interpretation, but because the work creates a space in which different experiences can remain present at the same time.

A successful piece is therefore not defined by its level of completion, but by its ability to retain ambiguity and temporality. If an image can still provoke different paths of viewing, still resist immediate judgment, and still invite repeated re-entry, then it is alive.

Soft resistance is not retreat. It is a water-erodes-stone infiltration, working through rhythm, structure, material choice, and the slowed act of looking to leave, gradually and persistently, a mark in the viewer's experience that has not yet been named.