Motel in Bangkok Painting

This work is part of Ketty Zhang's solo exhibition "On the ninety-ninth night" in Vancouver in 2022. Using text from Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse as a starting point, the mixed media series draws from personal memory to explore the themes of love, lost, nostalgia and new beginnings. This piece is painted by marking "negative space" of the image without sketching the outlines. "The objects turned out smaller than imagined, the lines less refined, the whole picture became childlike. It felt like writing with my non dominant hand. I was thinking about events in my life that didn’t turn out the way I expected them to but gave me a whole new kind of experience that I very much enjoy and cherish."