Alice’s Final Fantasy Series
Lotus Born in Dunhuang
My painting is fragmented because my way of seeing is fragmented.
As a contemporary Chinese artist, I often think about how I now look back at the cultural traditions that have shaped me. When I encounter temple paintings, Chinese landscape painting, folk images, or other inherited visual forms, I feel both familiarity and distance. There is something deeply recognizable in them, yet my relationship to these traditions is not continuous or complete. It is mediated by education, migration, memory, contemporary painting, photography, digital imagery, and the visual culture of the internet.
I cannot look at a Dunhuang mural with the same eyes that created it. My vision has already been shaped by Western drawing, European painting, modernism, contemporary art, and digital culture. I may understand ancient color through Bonnard, form through Western drawing, or surface and texture through contemporary painters such as Daniel Richter. At the same time, Chinese color, landscape painting, folk art, calligraphy, language, clothing, social relationships, and other cultural habits remain embedded in my experience.
These languages do not enter my work separately. They happen at once.
My paintings therefore emerge through fragmentation, hybridization, collision, displacement, and recombination rather than from a single stable cultural source. Different visual systems coexist without necessarily resolving into a unified whole. For me, this instability is not a problem to be corrected. It reflects the way I actually see.
Lotus Born in Dunhuang extends this condition into history itself. Padmasambhava belongs to a specific Buddhist lineage and visual tradition, while Dunhuang carries another enormous field of religious, historical, and cultural memory. The painting deliberately brings them together in a form that does not correspond to an actual historical image. In that sense, I am inventing a fragment of history.
But the invention is not simply fantasy.
It becomes a way for me to examine my real relationship with history. History is never encountered by me as something whole or untouched. It arrives through fragments, translations, reproductions, inherited narratives, personal memory, scholarship, ideology, images, and imagination. My understanding of Chinese culture—and even the cultural framework through which I understand my own existence—is partly inherited, partly learned, partly reconstructed, and partly imagined.
This is also why Padmasambhava matters in the work. His image carries ideas of transmission, movement, belief, translation, and cultural memory. Buddhism itself moved across languages, regions, political systems, artistic traditions, and historical moments. By relocating Padmasambhava into an imagined Dunhuang, I am exaggerating a process that already belongs to history: images travel, meanings shift, traditions adapt, and what appears stable is continually reinterpreted.
Digital culture intensifies this condition. Images today are cropped, enhanced, filtered, reproduced, recombined, and circulated without stable boundaries. AI pushes this even further, making it increasingly easy for something imagined to acquire the visual authority of something historical. But for me, AI does not create the uncertainty. It simply makes visible an uncertainty that was already there.
In this painting, the invented history becomes a way of reviewing my own relationship with inherited culture. It also reflects, at least in part, where my generation stands in relation to tradition: close enough to recognize it, distant enough to reconstruct it, and surrounded by so many competing visual systems that any return to tradition is already an act of interpretation.
For me, fragmentation is therefore not simply a formal strategy.
It is the structure of the relationship itself: between the present and the past, between inheritance and interpretation, between what is remembered and what is imagined.
I want the painting to preserve that uncertainty rather than resolve it.