Touch: Ink & Clay / City Gallery / May 2 – June 27, 2025
artist statement
My most vivid childhood memories are of my parents passionately discussing kiln firing issues and the latest developments in the art world over family meals. Whenever there was an art program on TV, my father would should dramatically, summoning us to the screen to make sure no one misses the rare glimpse of art news. That was my childhood – growing up in a small village in southern China where the main business was a ceramic factory.
It was only natural that both my brother and I pursued careers in the arts. I even chose to attend the same university and major in the same field as my parents, believing I, too, would dedicate my life to ceramics.
Reality, however, had other plans. I eventually became a teacher. Yet in my spare time, I would always reach for my brushes and a dish of ink, gazing into the distance, letting my strokes capture the outlines of distant mountains. Painting became a way to ease the anxieties of life while reconnecting with the mountain village of my childhood. Thus began a thirty-year addiction to ink painting.
Later, when my parents joined me in Canada, my father once came home from a walk carrying a large lump of clay, exclaiming, “the clay in Saint John is excellent! You must keep it and make something with it someday.” I laughed, setting the clay aside along with his hopes. Eventually, I discarded it, continuing to wrap myself in the familiar comfort of ink painting.
About three years ago, friends began asking why, after all my professional ceramic training, I wasn’t making ceramics. Their questions grew more persistent. Eventually, I said, “Alright” and started looking for ceramic materials.
In Canada, buying clay and glazes is easy, and kiln firing is accessible. But surprisingly, no store nationwide sold overglaze pigments – a basic material in my understanding of ceramics. When I told my mother, she immediately mailed me her remaining pigments from China. Thanks to her, I was able to create the ceramic paintings you now see in this exhibition.
In late 2024, I was fortunate to spend five weeks at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, where I divided my days between the painting and ceramic studios. Immersed in both worlds, my passion for art exploded with new energy. By day I painted the Rocky Mountains; by night I kneaded clay under the studio lights. The familiar yet distant atmosphere of the ceramic studio awakened some of my deepest life memories. By the time I left Banff, I had completed both a new body of landscape paintings and a bath of Raku-fired ceramic pieces. The Banff Centre team even encouraged me to apply again, this time for their ceramics program.
After returning to Saint John, I continued working almost every weekend, carrying brushes and clay to the Arts Centre to join my friend Melissa’s Long Pose classes. Facing live models, I had to choose instantly: clay or ink? Over time, this constant switching became a playful and creative challenge.
The hybrid works in this exhibition reflect these three years of transition and travel – across Canada’s east and west coasts, across painting and ceramics, across landscapes and human figures. In these crossings and touches, a kind of chaotic fusion emerged, which seems to mirror my life at middle age: reaching out to touch the world once again, through ink and clay, and finding new ways to feel it.
I am still struggling between tradition and innovation, still anxious between reality and dreams. Yet I continue to reach out – however faintly – with hope, seeking an outlet for my spirit in this chaotic world.
I never set out to become an artist; making art was, and still is, simply a way to heal myself.