My work begins with my dream during the epidemic. The news about the disease and the daily death toll made me very scared. It all happened close to me, one night during the worst of the epidemic, I had an incredible dream:
I walked into a gallery where there was only one work hanging on the white wall — an A4 sheet of paper, with map photos of different sizes and blocks of colour and lines. It seemed like a map in the film Inception. After that, a staff member came in and shared every detail of the work with me. When I looked up, it was me, and I was analysing my dream and my work with another myself.
After this dream, I read some books analysing dreams, the most enlightening thing for me was Freud in the Interpretation of dreams mentioned, the essence of dreams is the indirect expression of subconscious desires, the disguised — the satisfaction of repressed subconscious desires. In other words, my fear of the epidemic turned into my dream and the appearance of that piece.
The first part is the white space at the top. I don't think this part is meaningless. It may be a kind of blank space at the beginning of the universe or a kind of space left for your mind until the eyesight slowly descends to see the colour. Then another me in my dream reminded me that I was looking at the picture from the perspective of a third person, just like we were looking at the Google map.
Then I analysed the significance of the mesh lines in the work, which may reflect an order or connection of society or nature. But these colours can also be a performance of human desires or fears, like the protective colour of animals in nature, colourful neon lights, microscopic pictures of cells or viruses, and even predictions on nature disasters. I borrowed the pattern of Thousands of Buddhas — an array of images of densely arranged Buddhas on paper to represent a Buddhist paradise. In my opinion, it was a surreal scene, just like my dream, which also had a great influence on my creation and made my feelings figurative.
I used the computer to arrange the photos, and each one of photographs is a screenshot of my home area through the Google map, because this is where I started dreaming. This form of composition makes my actual map look like a part of a surreal world, like a mannequin connecting each 1cm wide square with lines. In my dream, this work is a layer of the human lungs with air material wrapped, so I chose to work up the bubble membrane, which looks like it’s been fogged up, with a fuzzy sense of dreams.
To sum up, this work is not quite finished yet. When it is hung on the wall of the art gallery, I will share my thoughts with visitors, and then this work is truly finished. Just like I did in my dream.
