The opening of this exhibition will be on my twenty-ninth birthday. It has a special meaning for me. All the time, I always want to give my 20 some years of life a self-righteous justification, if so, even when the end of the world comes I can also say to yourself: I have not live in vain.
Remember when I was facing some idols in my life in college I always signed to myself silently: there must be time to become more witted. However now I’m nearly 30, and find out that I haven’t become wiser like I imagined, this is really disappointing. I still feel upset for many boring and senseless things for a long time, and am still touched by some minor perishable things, thankfully.
My new exhibition is called The Gate of Dreams, which comes from a work I should have completed in the exhibition in 2012. In this work, I feel that it is about to open an unusually gorgeous entrance, is about to reach an ideal state. But in fact, this work had been modified for one year, it was a tough battle. Now it seems that this picture is like my long lost period, which represents the end of an experience, but also a symbol of a new beginning. I once have regarded creation as a river, and every day I was picking up something different in the river. The dream is like a web made of mosquito nets, which can help me embrace more unknown things, but for quite a long time, I even had no dream. Month after month I couldn’t draw anything, resulting great frustrations for me. The saddest thing is that sitting in front of a painting for a long time and don’t know where to start. Deny yourself, but don 't know how to build something new. So, for a while, I recorded things that I was interested in every day, as a way of comforting myself. Depicting the Galaxy Superexpress and mottled shadow in my illusion made me find the original intention of painting. I want to record all this, as Simon Schama said: The most deep-seated driving force of art is to capture evanescent visual objects and to transfer the perception: jubilance, fear and trembling, calm pondering, strong desire and plaintive sorrow and so on, is all kinds of emotion which we frequently experience in life, is the practice before our attack-shocked nerves numbed by the routine, time and distance and then covering all memories. This desire to grab the instant experience is a kind of desire which is not easy to obtain.
I began to fear no more, and the darkness was not as horrible as it once was.
I always want to build up a world of my own, keep exploring and running forward, then destroy and reconstruct. The world is interacting with the reality, just like a double life. I always feel so ordinary, but this imaginary world will make me recognize myself and make me who I am. Recently, when I was painting, I felt like I was going to open another gate to step on the road filled with unknown future.
I don’t know what kind of confusion and rough battle? I hope I can identify myself from the negation, keep growing. Perhaps, the gate of dream is just the gate leading to another dream, just like life.
God treats me not bad, giving me the opportunity to paint and family, teachers, friends who support my painting all the time, this really makes me feel lucky.
There’s still a long way to go, thank you all for company.
Mo Di
2016/1/29