Love Remains

“The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.”  ~ Carl Jung

Love Remains

Maybe due to my natural introvert temperament, I find immense pleasure these days in revisiting my old journals. I often discover sparks and inspiration from thoughts I recorded in the past. I liken my mind to a puddle of water: without fresh streams flowing into it, it would become a stagnant swamp, devoid of life. Finding these past sparks and inspirations is like injecting oxygen, sustaining my creativity.

Like checking my journals, I also have a habit of looking back at my old artworks, hoping to invigorate my occationally stagnant current work. Recently, I stumbled upon a painting called Love Remains, which I created quite a few years ago. It depicts an angel with wings crashing down to Earth. The palette for the entire painting is rather muted and melancholy, except for a vibrant rose held in a hand extended out of the painting. (It reminds me of the little girl dressed in red in the black and white movie Schindler's List.)

The style of Love Remains is distinctly different from most of my present work, which often consists of direct representations of what we see, without too much design or narrative plotting. In those pieces, the beauty and value lie in the pleasant subjects themselves, with my creativity and vision manifested in the colors, values, compositions, brushstrokes, and skillful execution. But Love Remains is stands apart. The image immediately challenges the viewer's eyes and mind, probably stirring up more questions than answers. Even as I look at the image now, remembering its creation, it evokes wonder, pride, surprise, awe, and the question: "What on Earth was the artist trying to say?"

My memory goes back to 2011, a day when I was doing my weekly figure drawing session. A lovely young model posed for us. After a series of short poses for quick sketches, we settled on a final reclined pose for the last two hours of a long session. The naturally reclined pose was clearly more comfortable for the model; she lay there on the podium like an angel drifting to sleep. I'd painted reclined models many times, and this was supposed to be just like any other figurative painting.

However, I quickly realized there was a large, beautiful Chinese character “爱” tattooed on her belly, bearing the meaning of "love." To my fellow artists, I'm not sure it registered much, but to me, in that moment, she became the embodiment of beauty—Aphrodite from Greek mythology, and an angel of love. My thoughts ran wild, like a horse that’s broken its reins. Perhaps also because of the Chinese character, it brought back some great old Chinese stories and folk tales of heavenly beauties falling in love with kind, honest men on Earth. But the endings in these stories are always tragic, as heavenly beings are not meant to unite with earthly ones. My thoughts kept spiraling, and my imagination flowed like a river.

A few days later, Love Remains was born, appearing in form like a Greek tragedy with a story rooted in Chinese folklore. I was spellbound, feeling like I was merely a vessel carried along by a powerful stream that tapped deeply into my unconscious mind. The title of the painting, Love Remains, has an obvious double meaning, fitting that same vein of thought. Years later, when I created the paintings called Dreaming White and Dream Carrier, the same force was at work again. These paintings blur the boundary between reality and dream, and the characteristics are often described as surreal, even though I wasn't consciously adhering to any specific school of thought when I painted any of them.  Creativity is like a bridge between the conscious and unconscious realms of the mind.  These paintings simply bring what is hidden into the light!

Dreaming White

Dream Carrier