Artworks

Li He Poem: Presented to Chen Shang, 1992

In China, a country of wise and well-versed men, Li He, in his poem Presented to Chen Shang, venting the bitterness towards life of a young man in China, wrote: “At twenty I am already downhearted.” Writing the poem on wet East Asian paper, gasenshi, with a brush saturated with ink, the ink spread until it completely swallowed up the shape of the characters, the blurring spreading until their shadows appeared faintly in a sea of ink. In this work, I attempted to embed “the bitterness of Asian artistic expression” by incorporating the natural effect of ink bleeding.