The Dreams from the Bottom of my Heart
I often used a surreal emotion to express real life, just as I liked to dream for the moment. Dreams and reality, life and art, were all transformed by my pen into a dreamlike new world. I wrote in my diary: ‘I was the lucky one.’ I loved graffiti and playing the piano, and my mother’s affection was reflected in my life. Painting was my dream in childhood, and today I still hold on to that ambition.
There was no complicated hustle and bustle in my personal world, nor the wish to climb to a higher social status: only vitality. I often imagined my world as a lotus pond, where I could hear the melody of the lotus petals and leaves creating a perfect harmony with the flowing water.
I have a painting called The Lotus Pond of Dreams, that shows a patch of reeds, a mysterious starry sky, and tiny fish swimming in clear water, forming a world alien to reality. I happily indulged my fantasies in these quite beautiful images, letting myself drift far away from the real world for long periods of time.
I frequently used the lotus flower as the vehicle of artistic expression for my cultural ideals, and often used it as a metaphor. A Chinese philosopher, Zhou Dunyi (1017–73), described the lotus in his poem Loving the Lotus: ‘The Lotus grows in mud, yet is never contaminated by it. And she floats on waving water, yet never dances with it.’ In this age of desire, the lotus has always brought me inner peace, and nostalgia for the time of innocence. I have often thought how wonderful it would be to be able to capture the remarkable beauty and mystery of the lotus flower with my own paintbrush.
Of course a , many painters have portrayed the lotus flower in various forms, so I wanted to find ways to paint it in my own unique way. I drew all kinds of lotuses, sometimes in full bloom after the rain, or as new buds in the pond. They always characterised the glory of the lotus and the mystery of nature.
My Chinese ink painting Waiting is a picture with red lotuses, clusters of small fish, quiet running water, and an inscription of poetic lines. From a distance and at first glance, the inscription looks like a drizzle of light falling rain, but on taking a closer look turns out to be a poem. This design broke with the traditional sense of time and space. I drew with the surrealistic power that conventional Chinese painting did not have.
I liked to pursue things that others had not, just as I had devoted my wholehearted love to my own life, without a care as to what others said about me. I considered it to be my life and that I had the right to love and paint, as long as I did it with sincerity.