JI LEI

Painting is rather a repetitive practice to me. By doing the work repeatedly, it allows me to penetrate the surface of daily life, and to explore the language of psychological-visual transference (memory-form creating). In order to find the hidden new world bit by bit, the action of painting becomes seeking and stripping away.

Is it possible to find a way to get along with the world and myself by painting? ‘Insomnia Town’ brings me to the mixed overlapping zone of consciousness, subconscious, time and space. The power of ‘uneasy community’ has acquired new construction through dreams; In Sky phenomena series, the realities and imaginations of various celestial phenomena from ancient times to now, have become my mandala. In the process of painting, hidden energy was obtained; Trans-land is an escape and deviation from an instant of reality. When I started to draft, it seems there was a fork on the road and I tried to walk across, but all I could rely on to get by were those blacks, whites, greys, and the dots, the lines, the surfaces, the colors and the strokes... it felt like I was lost for the time, but also felt like I was digging in all that.

This is not a linear progression of the three stages, but a compound and simultaneous work. I face my own problems in the way of painting, and keep returning to the problem of language along with the evolution of experience and thinking. All this may be ’Yue du(trans-)’, a shift of space, a voyage from the light to the unknown dark chaos. It is an action from the real world to the imaginary world, from this world to the parallel world. Only intuition—the glimmer of something in the dark, as if there were some strange glimmer of the light guiding the way.

If it doesn’t feel free anymore or you are not so sure about the existing framework we’re in, well, you might as well deviate deliberately and move towards the unknown chaos. That’s exactly what I’m doing through painting.