When I first entered university, seeing classmates with solid drawing foundations, I felt inferior and defeated every time I submitted an assignment. So after class I would rush to the studio to practise — not because I wanted to strengthen my fundamentals, but because I didn't want to lose. I didn't want my love of drawing to be lesser than theirs.

Around that time I met a photographer whose daily work was going out to shoot dozens of rolls of film and coming home to develop them. He photographed people, reality, love. He was the first artist I ever encountered. Our time together held intense pain and intense love. I loved who I was in his eyes, so I chose to engage with his photography through the very medium that had once hurt me — I selected photographs that featured me and translated them into my own works through photorealistic drawing. This transformation gave me a deep sense of security: even if we disappeared from each other's lives, the works would not.

Around that time, my sister took her own life in the days before her birthday. I saw her body on the grass, saw my parents weeping beside the garden with a grief that tore through everything — but I didn't see my own tears. While my parents blamed each other, I searched through her messy room looking for clues, trying to piece together her life and understand the logic that led her to this ending. The more I searched, the less darkness I found. What remained were landscapes she loved from her travels, smiles she shared with her boyfriend, and evidence of how hard she had tried to live. I truly could not cry — but I wanted to make something from the dark ending and the luminous memories.

Valley of Tears is my translation of intimacy.

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Photography became an interest through the influence of that photographer, and over those years it grew into something deeply important to me. I would bring at least two cameras — both film — whenever I travelled. I preferred the feeling of cost in each shutter press over the effortless capture of digital; I also loved the particular texture film gave to an image. If a single satisfying frame came out of a whole roll, it felt worth it.

Over time I accumulated a large collection of images. Among what I selected were not only "good photos" but also a pile of imperfect ones — some out of focus, some light-leaked and colour-shifted — that I couldn't bring myself to delete. I thought these "bad photos" had a painterly quality. Collecting them felt like gathering memory slices glimpsed through peripheral vision, like fragments of noise caught at the roadside. So I applied photorealistic painting to them again, this time choosing aluminium panels with an industrial quality. After repeated sanding and polishing, I painted on them in oils — the content being those "bad photos." Each painting was paired with a same-sized monochrome acrylic panel, representing the way a street advertising board becomes a blurred mass of colour when visually ignored.

Life Out of Focus is my practice of precision in exploring the boundary between photography and painting, and the relationship between material and subject expression.

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This work arose from a conceptual exploration of risk, gambling, and decision-making. It became the exhibition theme because of a series of events that threw my thoughts into disarray in the lead-up to it.

Every year Macao holds the Orient Foundation Art Prize, selecting one artist for the award. I entered at the encouragement of an elder. Fresh out of school, I submitted the wooden sculpture from my graduation project, expecting only to gain exposure in the field. To my surprise, I won. At the same time, I learned that someone had written to the Orient Foundation questioning whether I had created the work independently, even spreading rumours that I had a private connection with a judge. The malicious claims about "planned award-winning" left me defeated and withdrawn.

I told the leader of the association I was part of that I did not want my work to carry such negative associations — I intended to voluntarily decline the award. But after careful consideration, the leader encouraged me to accept the challenge and use my work to prove my own ability.

So I began thinking about "choice": when events unfold cleverly without my knowledge, and are perceived by others as some kind of "plan," do I still have anything resembling a choice? I brought together conceptual thinking about choice, life direction, and power in art, combined with the gambling character of my home city Macao, and the playfulness of Schrödinger's Cat — finally choosing to present all of this through the form of the "gambling box."

Choices is a foray closer to contemporary art — an exploration of material boundaries, and a process of thinking about how to make concept land precisely in a physical work.

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In 2019, while studying Japanese at a language school within the Kyoto University of the Arts campus, I received an invitation from the Creative Space beside the Macao Museum of Art to hold a solo exhibition. At that time I was in a period of career confusion — wanting to prove myself on one hand, unable to adapt to life abroad on the other. To reduce the impact of my symptoms on daily life, I constantly sought natural remedies: yoga, rock climbing, hiking, meditation, crystal healing, reiki, aromatherapy. I exercised actively to raise my dopamine, yet still couldn't stop myself from weeping during morning runs, crying through the remaining distance.

During that period I was thinking about the faith that keeps one alive — wondering whether all this effort, circumventing clinical treatment, was actually working. And so this exhibition theme emerged: rituality. Rituals are overly formal, too weighted with meaning; the "sense of ritual" is a form shaped by personal habit — its necessity is subjective. The exhibition centred on four installation works and one painting-sculpture, drawing from my lifelong real experiences of ritual, translating them into an Asian ritual involving death, hope, and spiritual cultivation — offerings, coffins, gravestones.

Monument to Love: a letter to a departed loved one written in the voice of a love letter, the words translated into three forms — handwritten letter, recorded audio reading, mirror-surface relief text — assembled on a transparent square monument, allowing the feeling to be seen, heard, and touched.

Gift: the painted Unicorn Girl fixed to a rectangular form made of stacked black paper boxes.

Fortune Altar: objects of great personal significance collected from several friends, arranged on a self-created altar for the "Star-Halo Religion," inviting the audience to pray, bless, and read the meaning of each object.

To Have Existed and to Exist No Longer — the Brilliant Sun: exploring whether, after a series of rituals, a person is defined as no longer existing.

Lighthouse, Coast: footage shot at midnight on Black Sand Beach playing on loop — dark waves crashing against the shore with surging sound — while the installation space holds a standing cross of faith.

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I have always loved the image of strands — hair, thin thread — things that seem fragile but accumulate into something powerful. A black thread is a strand of hair: the kind that falls every day onto the living room floor, the bathroom sink, the bedroom sheets — a trace of life. A pile of black thread is the end of hair; in Japanese horror films, long black hair is often used to conjure an alien suffocation and strangeness. Black thread is fear and force.

So I began experimenting with technical pens, wanting to use dense black lines to depict this sense of power. Innocence — adults always say that after growing up, childhood innocence is lost. I don't want to lose it. I want to keep it with me, remember it, use it. "Unicorns are attracted by purity" — so I created the Unicorn Girl, a long-haired girl with a horn on her head. She lives on my behalf in a world with no one else in it, so that no one can disturb her purity.

In 2015, the Unicorn Girl appeared for the first time outside a castle. She was originally an ordinary girl who lived inside, but in order to become the symbol of the purest being in the forest, she waited until the unicorn was not looking, strangled it, severed its horn, and placed it on her own head. From that moment on, she was the purest girl in that world.

Before 2022, I was always resolving problems of form in my painting — training my eye to see more accurately. When I felt that formal training had reached a stage of results, I grew more conscious of my not-very-sharp ability to perceive colour. So I began a colour exploration project, trying to set aside form and focus only on colour — expressing the feeling of a given moment with the most accurate colour I could find. In the process, my sensitivity sharpened. One day, walking down a street I passed every day, the leaves on the roadside appeared strangely vivid. "Were these trees always this green?" I knew then: my colour spectrum had widened.

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In the process of exploring colour selection and making work from daily life as subject matter, I developed a habitual approach to choosing colours. Looking back at my works, I noticed the colours I chose resembled the luminous palette produced by electronic screens — it turned out that, in my frustration with digital colour selection, I had been quietly imitating electronic colour systems by hand. And extending into the quality and presentation of the figures in my paintings, I found a strong connection to comics and cartoons.

Why paint this way? I have no interest in making comics, nor any desire to narrate a story through an image. The visual content structure of a painting, for me, is more often a representation of a present state. So I began thinking about when I first actively sought to learn to paint — ah, fifth grade of elementary school, just moved to Macao, signed up for my first drawing class: a summer holiday four-panel manga interest workshop. That was the happiest, most free period of creation in my life.

After the professional art training from secondary school through university — learning and experiencing many techniques and styles — what I ultimately pursue in my practice still returns to honesty itself. Honesty tells me that even though I deeply hope to achieve something in art, what I most want to do, even now, is return to the purest state of creation that I genuinely love. That is the most authentic creative drive — one I never want to lose or forget.

The characters and manner of painting in my works are an interpretation of childlike innocence. Even knowing that rigorous academic drawing and the layered quality of classical oil painting make people feel "that's painted very well," I still don't like perfect rigour. Too constrained a structure makes me feel unable to breathe. Even if I can, I choose not to — this is the consciousness and claim of this period. Choosing how to paint is the first step toward contemporary painting.

Painting is my most familiar language, the mode of creation I am most at ease with, and one I can practise at any moment. What do I want to paint? What has inspired me most is Gary Baseman's solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei in 2014. As I looked at his show and his paintings, my body had a strong reaction: first, goosebumps all over, then a sting in my nose and eyes. That is what being moved feels like. I too want to make works like that — works that move people, that touch emotion.

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Standing before this painting, the skin responds before consciousness does — without preparation. The response needs no emotion as an intermediary; it bypasses judgment and happens directly on skin and muscle.

Something beneath hearing passes through the painted surface and reaches the body. In that moment, the source of perception becomes impossible to identify: was that response caused by the gaze — or by something else?

This impossibility of telling is what truly interests me.

With broad strokes I push the figure toward ambiguity, suspending it between the recognisable and the unrecognisable. The figure here is not narrative but a body: a presence trying to hold its shape within a force that passes through it.

The viewer's body and the body in the painting are held inside the same force. The sensation is real, yet its source cannot be determined.

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