A Long Silence

This piece is part of my Ceramic Still Life Painting series. Before I began university in London, I spent several years in Soviet-style academic drawing training in China, preparing for the art university entrance exams. The education was intensely skill-based and highly tedious. I devoted long hours to making my drawings look exactly like the examples in textbooks, rehearsing styles preferred by examiners from different universities. I often questioned whether this was art at all, and felt completely lost. Yet even in that confusion, drawing remained a small source of light in my life, something that sustained me in contrast to the weight of my stressful schoolwork. These ceramic still life “paintings” revisit and reawaken those memories from my teenage years. I sculpt painterly strokes in clay, using a mixture of different clay bodies and glazes to mimic the gestures of oil painting. Through the process of making these works, I feel that I am slowly healing a part of myself from a decade ago.