Yichang Stories is a confrontation. It is an unflinching face-off with the past to understand the forces that constructed my present self. This project is a narrative I am compelled to tell, a visual and textual excavation of love, death, and the complex dynamics of a small-town upbringing.
Writing is the vessel of this inquiry. In my practice, the Chinese character is not merely a carrier of meaning but an aesthetic form, a pictogram that dances between legibility and abstraction. As a child, I used writing in different colours as a mechanism for release; today, this act links me to that younger self, turning the creative process into a ritual of self-healing.
In these works, I deliberately manipulate the boundary between what can be read and what is sensed. Text is obscured, layered, or dissolved into the landscape of the image, functioning as symbol and suggestion rather than direct instruction. The remaining legible characters allow viewers, even those who read Chinese, to piece together only fragmented, poetic phrases. The result is a form of visual poetry, an abstract landscape of memory where the story is felt before it is understood.
I use text as raw material so that it can be felt rather than read. Through the act of writing, covering, and rewriting, the specific stories of people I loved are transformed into abstract rhythms. Paint is purposefully used to make the diary entries difficult to read, reflecting how human memory deteriorates and changes with time.
