Painters’ Cohort 24′ (Alberto, Tianqi, Susu, Charles, Chauncey-Chenxi, Michael)

Medium format film photograph; multiple exposure negative (digital scan)

2023-2024

Camberwell College of Arts, South London 

I’m interested in painting with regards to art therapy, perception, and social engagement. To me, paintings are fluid and active markers of our subjective perspective from which we derive meaning in this world. While observing a visual work, we unwillingly tend to project our own experience onto an arbitrary arrangement of abstract traces, which we come to interpret as signs acquiring value, whether they explicitly reference it or not. This happens constantly in our daily experience; however, as a primitive and open form of language, paintings are coated with human conventions. I am interested in the subtle nuances between the conscious and unconscious reflection that relates specifically to this medium toward a form of personal inquiry and social dialogue.

Acknowledging the number of references and the visual culture that emerges while engaging with traditional materials on a flat surface has led to question the distinctions between abstraction and figuration. By engaging in a kind exercise that I have identified as a form of inverted will–a watchful state of absence–-I wait until symbols emerge from a set of seemingly arbitrary forms. In this manner, painting allows a process of play by which chance seems to give feedback on a seemingly self-generating image making process, much like in Carl Jung’s experience of active imagination.

While painting, I think of landscape as a traditional genre, which is inherently ambiguous as it is charged with unfixed symbols. Through form, extension, texture, richness and other parameters, landscapes portray a shared ground which challenges our bodily and social dilemma; we have seen how the various perspectives inhabiting a finite space lead to different, even conflicting views. In paintings made and interpreted according to a bodily, equivocal, and seemingly spontaneous process, these variety of views manage to coexist and somehow fit in the same picture, making it a suitable terrain for understanding and acknowledging it.