Athena Bing He
I am a product of the Mao era, where my parent’s lives were radically changed by the assorted revolutionary philosophies that nearly obliterated China’s cultural past for the purposes of Communist ideology and revolution that ultimately justified the concept of “means justifying the ends.” As a child born into this period in China, I knew no other life, and remembered it as “happy” until I began to seriously investigate it. Certainly, the Tiananmen attempt at counter-revolution that I experienced as a participating college student was key to the many thoughts and changes I went through from that moment onward. I left China primarily because of my precarious status in this country as a result of Tiananmen Square.
The years before arriving in New York in 2001 were very complex, and very difficult. By then I was a single mom whose child was still in China. Eventually, I met a man at the Art Student’s League who I fell in love with. We married and lived in his mother’s home in Queens, where we had a very bumpy time of it, especially after my15-year old son joined with us. Worried about his education, we moved to Westchester and enrolled him in Dobbs Ferry High School. I opened a small gallery in Tarrytown that served as my studio, and where I could teach art classes to make some money. Here, my husband got lung cancer that eventually killed him. I stayed with the gallery for another few years, which provided me with enough income to care for my son. Finally, I decided to return to school to pursue my MFA and closed the gallery in January 2015. I began my MFA studies in September of the same year at Lesley University’s Low-Residency program. I am now in my second year at Lesley. I have had the opportunity to work with a great faculty and many visiting artists, as well as artist/mentors in the New York City area. I have been newly introduced to Western art, integrating this with my Eastern culture. I have a new life now. My son is in the Navy loving every minute of it, I became a U.S. citizen, brought my parents from China to live with me until a get them their green card, moved to a great location in Scarborough, and am in the process of moving my studio from YOHO (Yonkers) back to Tarrytown in a wonderful new space.
What I know best, and what China gave me before leaving, is the gift of painting. Being an artist has become integral to whom I am, and through the act of painting, I have the luxury and pain of searching the memories, experiences, and history that China provides through each stroke of oil paint I apply to canvas. My newest paintings and my many thoughts about them, and the “stories” they tell, are reflective of deep personal investigations that collapse the past with the present, and ultimately become records of Loss.
They tell a special story, a narrative that demands a reciprocal act of “seeing” from the viewer, a metaphoric understanding and intuitive interpretation, while also intriguing the audience with the incredible skills I learned in China. I demand from my work what I am most is most interested in as subject matter, the human condition, in all its variety and multiplicity, one that expresses an ongoing individual search for vital meaning within a journey of becoming rather than being.
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