The Trees Are Naming Themselves
2024
The Trees Are Naming Themselves, is a series of new large-scale mixed-media works. Drawing from mythology and the interconnections between diaspora and memories, it explores the poetics where ancestral voices and botanical spirits coalesce through labyrinthine structures that defy the boundaries of landscape painting. Through the series, I ask: Can the language's limit, function in the way a tree might?
Rooted in recollections of her childhood in the ancient town of Minnan, China, my work embodies an enduring respect for spaces where deities, ancestors, and the living share sacred ground. In a time when humanity struggles to find agency amid sweeping historical shifts, my art emphasizes the connective power of ritual and its role in bridging generations, carrying both trauma and resilience forward.
Echoing Zagajewski's refuge in bells, I envision we shelter within trees, coursing underground through their torrential veins, beneath the soil, beneath the rumble of trains where a woman naps on her way home from a night shift; beneath the rising mist from rice cookers; toward seeds humming under the grief of morning frost; toward the moon of refusal; beneath words drowned in the shipwreck; beneath rotten landmines; beneath the watchful eyes of border officers; beneath riverbeds hiding long-lost coins marked with empires' face; beneath the fractured walls of mega-prisons. Return, return to the flicker of a moth's wing, to Baba Yaga's house with its defiant chicken feet, to Nüwa's breath sealing the sky, to the bones of moss, to Patala, to the Gumiho, to The Serpent Spirits' enduring gaze. Beneath the factory's roar, steeped in the memory of ancient coral, beneath the temple's bell, under the poet's window where time's hinges have given way—mothers await in roots, those hidden harbors and deep, braided paths.
