Statement

  The works are my manifesto as a pessimist.  

There was a homeless man I passed every day on my way from school back to the dorm. In winter, he would shiver under a paper-thin quilt. People, including myself, always hurried past him. I was scared to slow down—as if stopping for even one second would unleash a deafening voice, a judgment trumpet blowing: why is he out here in the cold, while I have a warm, safe place to return to?

That question has haunted me. The question of fate—what determines it, what divides us, and why?

This is where my work begins. I return to more figurative human paintings. To find the “Human, all too human.”

The next portraits I made were of people I saw standing on medians: an ill-minded man, a woman who could not stop screaming. I couldn’t look away. And yet, they disgust me.

I try to turn to the past. At least history feels finished—damaged, yes, but already done. The present is the uncertain future ahead of me, which I'm too powerless and too scared.

Even then, I can’t find peace in the images of art history. These beautiful, idealized bodies echo louder now. People once knelt in worship before them. Some still do.

But what are they kneeling for? A god? An ideology? A lover?

I’m drawn to this gesture of surrender. I question but also envy it—this devotion without hesitation. To kneel, to pray, to offer yourself completely to something. To bend your body in that delicate, elegant, submissive shape.

The god on a cross becomes my scapegoat. I have so many questions for him—not just why, but why them? Why are some lives sacred, and others disposable?

The Pietà means “holy sorrow.” Michelangelo’s is the most famous: Mary carry her son’s body from the cross. It’s majestic. People cry beneath it. Do they weep out of the sympathy for the mother’s grief, or because it is on a pedestal?  

Do we worship sorrow, because they truly feel it, or because it’s divine? What is sympathy nowadays? Is it a production of the society to manipulate people? Like some politic activist claimed?

Can death redeem what came before it?

I have so many questions, I don’t have answers, or I have. I start my art statement with “my works are my manifesto as a pessimistic”. 

I don’t believe in the tragedy of kings or heroes. I believe in the tragedy of the forgotten. The ordinary. Those who die not with a bang, but with a whimper—too many, too quietly.

Do we mourn them? Do we even remember them?

Perhaps the only way to be remembered is to be carved into stone—made into a monument, tall as a mountain, wide as a river.

Would you kneel before that?

I still don’t know.