My artistic life took root in the fertile soil of painting, roughly spanning from 1985 to 1993. This early phase was never a mere process of technical polishing, but a relentless exploration of the forms of artistic language. Paper emerged as my most faithful medium—precisely because it could perfectly capture the unrestrained, vivid texture traces left by the flow and permeation of water-soluble materials, allowing every moment of creation to leave a tangible mark. I was obsessed with breaking the boundaries of materials, weaving together conventional water-soluble media such as acrylics, watercolors and gouaches with seemingly unorthodox elements like toothpaste, alum and rice paper collages. These water-compatible substances triggered fascinating chemical reactions on the paper surface: the granular texture of toothpaste created unexpected raised textures; the water-repellent property of alum generated mottled blank spaces; and the overlay of rice paper added layers of depth. Through continuous learning, experimentation and refinement, I gradually developed a set of distinctive integrated techniques—the heaviness of piling, the profundity after covering, the transparency brought by washing, the mistiness of rendering, the sharpness of scraping marks, and the richness of overlapping layers. Conceptually, my works emphasized a sense of historical scarring, with a sharp focus on themes of social public space and anthropology. This line of thinking led me to put forward the artistic philosophy that "contemporary images are historical images". The core idea is to embed or integrate contemporary figures, objects and their activity trajectories into rock painting-like "relics"—as if they were scenes uncovered by people thousands of years later, after brushing away layers of dust and grime. It is also an act of excavation through "visual archaeology": from the perspective of trace restoration, the canvas reveals the characteristics, evolutionary paths and aesthetic-cultural information of modern humanity. After this foundational period of painting, I embarked on a lengthy phase of experimental conceptual art across diverse mediums including installations, performance art and video. Eventually, I circled back to painting as the starting point, embarking on a new journey of integrated artistic experimentation.

Later, I launched a new set of technical experiments using paper as the medium again. Specifically, I adopted extreme colors, mainly black, to intensively outline the edge lines and traces on the canvas, and applied contrasting flat washes, making those textured marks stand out more prominently. I named this painting method "Tracing", which is a further extension of my earlier "relic painting" experiments. It aims to highlight the fusion of deliberate "artificial" traces and accidental "serendipitous" marks, forging a "pop-art-infused" abstract visual language that combines both cold and warm abstract expressions. In doing so, it invites viewers to contemplate the paradoxical relationships and philosophical implications between wildness and tranquility, chaos and control, sensibility and rationality, as well as nature and humanity. Beyond the canvas, "Tracing" has also expanded into the realm of social public space art that embraces decentralization and public participation, giving rise to a series of works including the Outdoor Tracing 1.0–4.0 projects (measured by the scale of public engagement), as well as the Water Tracing and Facial Tracing series.Taking social "Tracing" activities as the axis, my painting practice has entered the starting point of a new journey. The linguistic extension of studio-based "Tracing" is no longer confined to the trace-repeating approach similar to outdoor "Tracing"; instead, it has spawned more complex, multi-method, and "branching-out" linguistic experiments. Naturally, the starting point of these linguistic experiments stems largely from the observation and visually intensified experience of contemporary daily landscapes—similar to the forced intrusion of visual tones derived from big data statistics, the excessive rendering of popular cultural elements, and the inspirations brought by the intervention of high technology (such as the significant replacement of physical viewing by screen viewing, and AI thinking modes). In this new phase, I have abandoned paper as the carrier and turned to canvas instead. I mainly use various modern industrial paint materials such as acrylics, including pink, metallic colors, pearlescent colors, white glue, silica gel, and modeling paste, to conduct new experimental creations.

This kind of creation further emphasizes action-oriented expression, where techniques like rapid brushwork, blind painting, impasto, splashing, washing, and random scraping are employed to build up complex color-field textures. Under the force of gravity, these textures naturally produce the visual effect of liquid drips, which often blend with various brushstrokes and the balance of wet and dry layers, resulting in a visual outcome that is both contradictory and harmonious.

"Multi-layer superimposition" and "zero-degree compression" are also key features of my painting experiments during this phase. When working on the background of the canvas, I favor using tape and straightedges to create industrialized, regular visual patterns. These patterns are usually rendered with thin, gradient, and randomly selected flat color washes—even after multiple layers of superimposition or blending, they still maintain a delicate, translucent quality, achieving the "zero-degree compression" I pursue. The hard-edged visual elements of these flat color layers often engage in a mutual interplay and dialogue with the soft color masses formed later through action-driven image construction. Once the processes of flat color superimposition, action painting, and random scraping are completed, a trace-based underlayer is formed, awaiting further refinement.

Next comes the reworking of the trace-based underlayer, which can be done in several ways. First is "intensive tracing": batch outlining and darkening the relatively shadowed areas of the entire canvas, such as boundary lines, dark color fields, and drip edges. Second is "subtle tracing": selectively and randomly enhancing traces and edges with colors of varying shades and tones. Third is targeted refinement: selectively or batch-processing image symbols of the same tonal quality (such as drips) with makeup-like modification or enhancement. Fourth is the integrated approach: a combination of the above three methods.

When it comes to the treatment of images, I tend to suggest only the broad outlines of human figures and objects, without setting any predetermined directions. I strive to minimize or even eliminate narrativity as much as possible, instead letting the images evolve under the guidance of procedural and accidental elements. In other words, it is perhaps the "mistakes", "deviations", "errors" and "flaws" emerging during the creative process that serve as the main basis for my image construction. The further I progress into the process, the more I abide by the visual outcomes it generates—that is, I do not wrestle with the canvas, but seek reconciliation with it. This bears a resemblance to the visual results generated by AI through extensive learning, self-training and continuously optimized algorithms.

In the recently upgraded Traces of the Future series, I create micro-folded textures for visual tracing through the composite lamination of acrylic imprints and 3D materials. This collision of materials enables the visual translation of time from a unidirectional linear form to a multi-dimensional interwoven state, generating a temporary, flowing, and uncertain magical landscape. Through this brand-new painting perspective, I aspire to explore post-contemporary sociological topics at the intersection of carbon-based and silicon-based life, such as the subconscious, identity recognition, subject-object transformation, and cultural monster imagery, ultimately turning the works into visual archives that carry temporal information and ideological issues.