Filling in the Gaps ...

I strongly believe my life experiences have always been full of alternation, both in physical and spiritual respect. It is not surprising to me that every short trip or long journey is alike the formation of a fresh drawing of an imaginary voyage. These ideas are constantly being infused into my personal perceptions. Coming to unfamiliar or exotic places and having been amazed by them, it is to me no less than a sort of bewilderment; an insight into the lacunae that are in the mind. The memory thus starts to fabricate an alternative narration, that is anecdotal in the light of an individual discernment and apprehension of reality.

Traveling has hereby become a different approach to search for novelty and diversity. Sometimes, when everything has periodically returned to the state of 'business-as-usual', I can allow my emotions to dwell on the fleetingness of experience. Then, bit-by-bit, these experiences will possibly be locked up in my memory or perhaps, alternatively, they will disappear without any trace. Also, at sometimes there can be an empathetic occurrence happening in my life that is relevant to its experiential counterpart in my memory. This stirs up the desire to reform and refine those fragmented recollections. They turn out to be a series of twisted, deformed and misshaped sequences of reminiscence.

There is a 'history' which stands real behind my works of art. And if this is the case, then how should I speak about this? It is not as if I am inventing a marvelous creation, nor is it as miserable as if one is undergoing a true catastrophe. It is more like a place, a 'place' that is forever staying and it is evocatively haunting in my mind; it is a place where I used to spend my time in childhood and adolescence; a place that never had any 'proper' name or description. I have been the witness to the whole process of it being maintained, developed, and then being devoured and metamorphosed as a consequence of modernization and urbanization in my home city. The continuation of alternations will not stop. In my mind, as a conjunction, this place is a land of loss, but not a land of forgetting.

The past can never chronologically return to the present, howevermore, the 'place' remains in my spiritual reality. It symbolizes a conceptual space where ramifications of occurrences and contingencies are interrelated into a complex of creation. In this 'place' the self-awareness, sagacity and sensitivity towards the real deterioration to recollections. Therefore, my working process is to regain this awareness in order to reconstruct the understanding towards environmental and mental alternation. My mind is full of wonders, but there are also confusions and uncertainties. It wanders, and searches for answers in both novelty and deviation in what is like an act of tracing. This is to examine my emotions and mentality in introspection. Tracing thereby penetrates the practice of thinking and understanding, which in consequence, accomplish the work of art.

Yuan Gao.

Sunday, May 9th 2010