Time is not long Print

I studied at the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University, one of China’s most prestigious institutions. After graduating in 2005, I worked in design before teaching in high school—an experience that unexpectedly rekindled my passion for painting. In 2009, I created my debut painting, encouraged by a letter from Charles Saatchi. In 2014, I was discovered by Rebecca Wilson, Chief Curator of Saatchi Art, which became a turning point in my international exposure. My works have since been collected by private collectors across the U.S., Taiwan, Germany, Spain, Greece, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, Portugal, Nigeria,China and Brazil—over 100 original paintings to date. Curator Kat Henning (Saatchi Art) wrote: “Her portraits possess an innate sense of loneliness and anxiety, reminiscent of Francis Bacon. She blurs out facial features deliberately, as if resisting identification. Her expressive, impasto brushstrokes—along with vivid blues, ochres, greens, and pinks—ignite the canvas and invite the viewer to linger.” Through distorted, emotionally charged portraits, I explore the inner tensions of modern life—conflict, isolation, identity, and the strangeness of being human. My subjects include friends, my partner, mother, students, animals, models, and myself. Every face holds a fragment of my world. 🩵Artist Statement My portrait work began with an intuitive exploration of facial structures, where early paintings emphasized emotional release and raw collisions of brushstroke. As my practice deepened, I began to see the face not merely as a structure, but as a symbolic space—where identity leaves traces and emotional states reverberate. Later, I shifted toward the visual reconstruction, layering, and disintegration of the human figure, evolving a portrait language rooted in distortion, concealment, and fragmentation. My work explores the emotional tension between identity and distortion. Through gestural, layered brushwork, I attempt to capture the invisible weight of modern life—loneliness, disconnection, and the ambiguity faced by human beings in their wholeness. By deliberately obscuring facial features, I resist fixed identification and create a space for psychological projection. Each painting becomes a confrontation: between the visible and the invisible, memory and reality, the internal and the external. Painting, for me, is not about likeness—it’s about presence. It’s about confronting what cannot be explained in words.