Entrapmen & Escape
The Entrapment & Escape series emerged after Serenity, marking an inward plunge into the most extreme depths of the spirit. It was a path of “inner excavation” I had followed for a long time, until, at the edge of exhaustion, I finally turned back and broke away. My later theoretical concept of the “metaphysical return” grew directly out of the inspiration sparked by this reversal.
Works such as Construction, Cross, Galaxy, and Cave became the most arduous representatives of this phase: textures piled up layer upon layer, colors oscillated between polychrome and monochrome, dissolving one another in search of a fragile balance. Like existential entanglements of life and death, I tried again and again to ignite the ashes, yet restrained myself from letting the fire fully blaze. In this tug-of-war between restraint and rebellion, the fusion of minimal metaphysical logic with the marks of the body brought my spirit to the brink of its limits.
The subsequent Trace series revealed a loosening: the relaxation of structure and color signaled a parallel softening of the spirit. Yet this shift was interrupted by my father’s illness and passing, and later by the pandemic I encountered after moving to the United States. More than a decade of metaphysical abstraction was thus suspended, replaced by experiences of survival and emotional reality in the earthly city.
Many have assumed that my works “suddenly became bright and colorful” only after I arrived in the U.S. In truth, the change was born from the rigorous discipline and solitary exploration that preceded it, leading to the Daoist turning point of “reversal as the movement of the Way.” The resurgence of abstraction came only in my second year of living abroad, when I had adapted to the intensity of life in a foreign environment, and metaphysical fervor reemerged, bringing new breakthroughs in theory as well.
Created with mixed media, Entrapment & Escape embodies the tension between confinement and liberation. The former breathes in suffocating layers of color and texture, as though self-buried; the latter allows form and hue to loosen, spreading gently like fleeting traces in snow, like a horse vanishing in a blink, evoking the psyche’s release and its urge to break free. Though the two states appear in sharp contrast, they stem from the same transitional demand of that time: the passage from self-closure to self-unsealing.
