"No Pause"

Sculpey, acrylic, canvas, oil, dura-lar collage, nail, bell, jute twine on board
9.25 x 16.25 x 2.25 inches

I take self deprecating humor way too seriously. My current body of work features donkey imagery as the main subject. For example, in No Pause, a sculpted donkey head protrudes into the viewers’ space. I tie a customized canvas mask on the donkey head and paint a pair of goofy eyes. At the base of the donkey neck, I hammer a nail and attach a bell using jute twine. The surrounding painted area feels almost ridiculous. The background color evokes the flesh tone of skin, yet there’s no human form to be found. Touches of blue and violet drift around the donkey. Pieces of dura-lar collage, resembling thought bubbles, stick out beyond the edges of the panel, as if refusing to stay contained.

Donkey is a mirror, reflecting me and countless others. Inspired by one of the punchlines in traditional Chinese comedy Xiangsheng, I find the donkey to be a pathetic yet oddly familiar character. In one particular plot, donkeys are made to drag millstone. Farmers strap masks around their face to spare them from the dizziness of circular motion. They also hang bells on the donkeys to ensure the labor never stops. The bell sound is the symphony of productivity. Once that bell ceases, the donkey gets a good beating for slacking off. Xiangsheng comics love to mock donkeys, for their pitiful existence as nothing more than laborers. I too laugh at donkeys’ suffering. Yet my laughter lands closer to a kind of brutal mockery of my hidden self.

I admit that I cheated on conventional painting with other mediums. It feels liberating. In the past months, I wrestled with the aesthetic of Cecily Brownesque figurative abstraction, hoping to instill a more playful attitude toward my paintings. I soon came to realize that I can only truly play when I commit my attention to unfamiliar materials. Combining oil painting, bas relief sculpture, found objects, and collage, I work both meticulously and expressionistically. I search for a sense of the unknown, in the same way a donkey attempts to stray away from non-stop circular motion. Looking at my work, you confront the donkey character — a well-behaving grind pushed toward constant progress. But I am not just the donkey, I am the farmer too, readily swinging the whip at myself for any lapse in productivity. Who needs external pressure when you’ve got your own personal tyrant inside? By now, the bell rings by itself, even in my sleep.