Artist Statement

Seeing all my paintings, the first question you probably want to ask is: why is the "boy" always smiling?

Going through my university studies, I noticed how few smiles are remembered in art history, aside from the mysterious Mona Lisa, most portraits seem stoic, emotionless. I always wondered why. Is human joy really not important enough to remember? Does only horror, pain, and suffering deserve to be preserved?

The boy's smile comes from a moment.

My family used to have a dog named Baobao — a little princess who treated me like her maid. After a series of fortunate events, my parents sold our family house and we moved into a much smaller townhouse. That's when I became her full-time, 24/7 maid. She would bark at me whenever she needed something — food, or to be let out into the garden to pee. She would scratch the paper I laid on the bathroom floor before I left for work into little pieces, to show her anger to pee in a room instead of on grass. A rageful little thing — in the first three years she was in my life, I got a rabies vaccine shot every year, after she bit me.

I think she was angry at me from the very first moment she saw me. I was lying on the sofa, half-asleep, when I saw my mother open the door and put something down on the floor. The thing moved toward my hand and licked it. I realized it was a dog, and said, "Mother, where did you get this ugly dog?" That day, she peed in my room — the only time she ever peed in a bedroom. I think she understood what I'd said.

After my parents moved back to their hometown and left her with me, it became six memorable years together. Every day I cooked for her — chopped pork or beef with Chinese cabbage and carrot, twice a day, alongside Royal Canin dog food — and walked her at the dog park once a day.

I remember one regular afternoon, cloudy, like any other day in Richmond. I came home early. She hadn't heard me come in, still sound asleep in one of her five beds around the townhouse, tongue hanging out, curled in a C shape. I was looking at her when the sun came out and cast a reflection of my face onto the glass door of the microwave. I was smiling. I hadn't even realized it.

Not so much in the last few months of her life. When I looked at her then, my eyes would turn red, my stomach would ache. Who knows — when your heart breaks, the heart doesn't hurt. Your stomach does. I used to wonder how actors could cry on command. Now I can too.

The boy, in a way, is the most innocent part of me — the part that still wonders about love, and whether there's any meaning to all these paintings. I guess it's just a question, What is the thing that makes you smile unconsciously? What is the thing that makes your eyes sparkle like the starry sky? for him: it is the little princess that barks,