I named this series of paintings as “Resilience” to represent, after my arrival to New York, my journey of restarting my passion for painting and the process of self-healing my traumatic memories with art I experienced when I was a teenage girl.
My memory of the experiences I had with art was painful and depressed. I wanted to be an animation director when I graduated from middle school. Although my parents allowed me to attend an art studio to learn sketching and drawing, they refused my dream of applying to art schools and kept telling me that I would not have a future if I pursued a career related to arts.
I still remember during the summer of 2008, I attended a drawing class in an art studio. The course was specially designed for the training of the art school entrance exam. The teacher required us to sketch plastered geometric forms. While working on the project, the teacher told us how to mimic what he was doing and how he practiced very hard when he was a student in college. For instance, he lifted his arm for the whole day to gain more strength to draw. In the class, I practiced drawing the same model repeatedly to represent the proportion and shadowing of the object best. The teacher didn’t allow me to paint with color because he said I needed to excel in drawing first. I felt my eagerness of creative expression being compromised and ultimately felt a strong sense of failure. As a result, I quit those classes in that studio. Between that criticism and what my parents were telling me, I gave up on my dream.
Years later, Months before I came to the US, I regained my confidence and decided to try again. I attended a studio art program given by a retired instructor. I thought this would help to restart my passion for the arts. He showed me the techniques to analyze and represent the relationship between model and background into different degrees of shade. There was a time when I was drawing a clay pot, and the instructor thought I didn’t bring the scale of the pot correctly, so he made me start over to draw a plastered geometric form to practice presenting the scale. When I was drawing in my way, he told me that my style was wrong, and he could not accept it. Hearing that, I became bewildered as to why I was even taking instruction from him.
My depressing relationship with art drastically changed when I arrived in New York. I took a painting class during the first semester of my master's program. In the course, the professor told us to paint any style and content in which we felt comfortable. Each week, she gave us a prompt as inspiration and told us we could paint whatever we wanted. After we submitted our paintings, the professor just told us to discuss each of our paintings and reflect on what we learned without leaving any comments. Having experienced learning authoritatively and rigidly, I became confused and lost my standard of how to paint. Several weeks later, I realized that if I want to be creative in art, I would have to unlearn what my parents and the instructors previously told me and ideologies in the culture that I experienced, which created a severe conflict of my mind. When I raised this thought in class, one classmate said, “Congratulations! You are allowing yourself to become better.” I felt this was condescending but soon realized he was right, and I needed to open up to be able to explore freely.
In August 2018, I started attending courses at the Art Student League of New York. The instructor encouraged students to pay significant attention to how to see and interpret models. He never interjected his opinion when students were painting or rejected their painting style. In sum, the way of learning painting at the Art Student League is like a combination of the instruction in China and the United States. During my study there, I tried many courses, including portraiture and life painting, color theory, anatomy, and figure drawing, and so forth. It was amazing that I had so many "first-time" experiences there: The first time I ever painted a still life in oil. The first time I drew and painted a nude body. The first time I learned anatomy. The first time I sketched a human body in 1 and 5 minutes, etc.
What my parents told me and the ideologies of the culture I grew up from in, deeply penetrated my mind. I found it was hard to fight with those entrenched thoughts and had to dig deep to find the artist's version of me.