Artist’s Note

 

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The house where my early works were stored collapsed after prolonged heavy rain. Almost all of those works were destroyed. At nearly the same time, my religious faith also collapsed. I moved to Haikou and began making art again while preparing to apply to art schools in London. Learning about other artists’ practices also encouraged me to try new materials.

 

After leaving Tibetan Buddhism, I turned towards Western spiritual practices. I studied Dolores Cannon’s quantum hypnosis and explored crystal healing, energy healing and related books. At the time, my rented home was filled with crystals. If crystals had the healing qualities I believed in then, could I bring them into painting?

 

I worked directly with crystals in solid form. I also washed and ground crystals and minerals, let the particles settle, then dried and ground them again into fine powders. At first, I tried painting with the powders alone. They did not adhere well or form a stable paint, so I began mixing them with oil paint and painting mediums.

 

I also wanted to know whether grinding crystals, mixing them into paint and letting it dry would produce different readings from works made with raw crystals or ordinary paint alone. I bought a measuring device and compared the works in a gallery. In those comparisons, works made with raw crystals gave higher readings than those containing mineral powder. Both gave higher readings than works made with ordinary paint alone. By the end, I still had not worked out exactly what the device measured, what the differences meant, or whether they had any effect on the human body.

 

I was still working on canvas, but I had begun to explore materials beyond paint and their connection to my own spiritual experiences.