Intrusion - homage to Francis Bacon

In 1996, I left China for Paris, during the first days, I happened to pass by the Francis Bacon’s retrospective exhibition in the Center Pompidou, it was the first time that I saw his works. The visual impact and the originality of these paintings, the cruel reveal of human’s living condition, and his unique perspective of loneliness and violence… I felt that all my esthetics structure was broken into pieces and the shock at that time is still fresh in my memory.  After that, I entered the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris and studied under Vladimir Velickovic, who was one of the leading figures of French figurative painting at that time. His style was similar to that of Bacon, and he was one of Bacon's best friends in Paris.  So from the beginning, Bacon's influence on my art is huge. Bacon's studio was like a forbidden place, when the artist was alive, even the house cleaners were not allowed to enter. After his death, his studio was sealed in glass by the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin.  In this series, I turned myself into a naughty boy who intrude into Bacon’s studio, hoping to have fun but couldn’t help but lost in thought. Being living in Europe and America for more than 20 years, i still felt myself as a cultural intruder, diving headlong into the Western art, not only need to jump out of my original cultural and aesthetic comfort zone, but also have to break all cultural barriers.

As proved by the contemporary physics that the past is not really fixed, and the future is not really open. My works are always trying to change my childhood, and keep questioning on my passed memories .  In China of the 1970s, as a generation of one child policy, I lived in Guilin, a southern city in China. At that time, it was impossible to visit Bacon's studio in England, and I had never seen big snow in my childhood.  These missing elements have been filled through my paintings which reconstruct my childhood again.  The chaos of Bacon's studio and the cleanliness after the big snow, the Western art and the Eastern harmony between men and nature, the colorful oil paint and the Binary black white… they are in dialogue with each other in this exhibition, especially in Hong Kong - as a major stronghold for the intersection of East and West, which it is also a place where various cultures intrude into each other，adding more layers to these conversation.