Feb. 1, 2024

A sense of disappointment creeps in every time I finish a painting. My work is the only thing that makes me feel like myself. Everything else feels like a pretence. Art is more real than life.

But what, then, is Art? I have so much hope of catching it when I begin a work, but it always slips away by the time I’m done.

Is Art, like God, sui generis—–a category unto itself, beyond comprehension? If so, how can I know Art? Perhaps the answer lies not in abstraction, but in analogy.

Feb. 2, 2024

Not through Abstraction, But by Analogy

During the early weeks of the war in Gaza, I was in southern France. While sunbathing on the Côte d’Azur, I watched the massacre unfold across the sea, live on my phone. Out of habit, I visited the Musée Matisse, Musée Chagall, Musée Picasso, Fondation Maeght, and others. The modernist masters aimed for a child-like naïveté through strenuous abstraction. This time, in the face of war and the ocean, their work felt too light.

Since October 7, every boundary—geopolitical, moral, even aesthetic—seems to have shifted, including my own understanding of Art.  I had never before contemplated the moral dimensions of Art. I grew up in China, where decades of moral hyperbole, hypocrisy, and ideological propaganda accustomed many to a disconnect between words and deeds, fostering a pragmatic, at times cynical, worldview. Our language and art were reduced to political tools, becoming formulaic, sentimental, and insincere. Because of this, I insist on believing—and still do—that beauty transcends good and evil, and that Art should exist for its own sake. Consequently, I eschewed any moral judgment in my work.

However, the war in Gaza has opened something within me. For the first time, I witnessed what I can only call “moral beauty” in a human soul. Brilliant intellectuals—Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Norman Finkelstein, and Ilan Pappé—along with several remarkable journalists, have seen more malevolence and corruption than most. Yet, despite paying a personal price for their integrity, they maintained their moral courage. They did not turn cynical or despairing; instead, they remained steadfast in their commitment to truth and doing good. In them, I finally grasped what Confucius meant by 君子 (junzi, the noble or ideal man). Although 君子 has been extolled in Chinese education for over two millennia, I had never truly encountered one until now—perhaps due to my own blindness or the materialism of my surroundings.  The feeling I had, seeing the souls of these men, was as exalted as the tears brought to my eyes by the Parthenon sculptures.

For the first time, I began to ponder the Platonic Triad of higher Forms––truth, beauty, and justice––and the relationship between Art and morality.