On Painting in China for the World

There is a question I get asked, sometimes gently and sometimes with genuine skepticism: what does it mean to be a painter in China selling work to collectors in Europe and America?

I used to stumble over this question. Now I think it is the wrong question.

The painters I have loved most — de Kooning, Diebenkorn, Zao Wou-Ki — were all, in some sense, painting across distances. Geographic, linguistic, historical. That distance did not diminish their work. In many cases it was the work. The pressure of holding two worlds simultaneously produces something that neither world could produce alone.

My medium is water and flowing color. Water does not care about borders. It finds the lowest point, fills every shape, and moves on. I have always found this quality useful as a metaphor and as a practice: paint until something true arrives, then let it go.

The collectors who respond to my work tend to be people who have also lived across distances — between cultures, between versions of themselves, between what they were told to want and what they actually love. They recognize something. I don't know how to explain it more precisely than that.

If you are reading this and a painting has caught your attention, I want you to know that the attention is mutual. I made it for someone like you.