Notes on Loss (Wen Zhu Chined)  

 

     I painted this ‘beautiful’ goddess of Wisdom (Wen Zhu, an ancient carved wooden Buddha) as if she is desperately hanging on, in a world of decay and destruction. 

 

     Removed from her original site, she appears now to be below ground, perhaps within a cage, chained down, confined to an existence of ugliness, a place of ‘ruin’.

 

     What purpose does the Buddha have any longer? In her absence, what kind of wisdom can she offer to China’s ‘polluted’ environment?

 

     I see this battle between ‘the ugly’ and ‘the beautiful’ as part of today’s China. 

 

     Where did the 6000-years of artistic and cultural ‘beauty’ go in this ‘modern’ Chinese world?