A Gardener Tends Flowers; I Tend Painting

For me, this is not a metaphor but a correspondence: two different kinds of work that share the same underlying logic—the sustained care of a process already underway, rather than the direct production of a result.

A gardener does not create a flower.

He cannot command it to bloom at a particular moment, nor can he decide the exact form in which it must grow.

What he can do is continually adjust the conditions: soil, water, light, space, and the relations among them.

In this sense, his work is not to produce an outcome, but to sustain an environment in which an outcome may become possible.

My work in painting is similar.

I do not directly “make” a painting come into its own.

What I do is continually adjust a set of relations within the picture, so that a certain state may become possible within it.

In the context of contemporary art, many things can be manufactured.

A style can be manufactured. A concept can be manufactured. A narrative can be manufactured. Even an appearance of “maturity” or “depth” can be manufactured.

There is nothing inherently wrong with these things, but none of them can guarantee that a work will truly hold.

I often encounter works that possess a complete concept, a clear structure, and a mature language, yet still fail to stand on their own.

They can be understood, but that does not necessarily mean they hold.

This distinction became the starting point of my work.

My early training was in figurative painting, and I once understood painting primarily as a form of expression: a way of communicating experience and emotion through images.

Through continued practice, however, I gradually came to realise that once a work leaves its maker, its meaning enters a process of continual change.

Different viewers produce different interpretations, and different contexts reorganise what the work means.

Meaning is therefore no longer stable.

This forced me to bring my attention back to the picture itself.

Colour, space, edges, texture, density, and the traces left by covering gradually became the basic materials of my work.

My way of working is usually not to execute a predetermined plan, but to continually revise my judgment through the process of painting.

Adding.

Covering.

Erasing.

Rearranging.

Disrupting.

These actions constitute the process of painting.

Within this process, “disruption” is not a form of negation. It is a form of adjustment.

A painting is often most at risk of losing its force not when it fails, but when it begins to proceed too smoothly.

When the picture starts to appear coherent, complete, or even beautiful, it often begins to lose the possibility of further development.

At such moments, I intervene again.

I interrupt the order that has already taken shape, reintroduce uncertainty, and return the picture to a state in which it has not yet become fixed.

This is closer to a gardener’s pruning than to a creator’s design.

A gardener does not prune in order to destroy, but to redistribute the possibilities of growth.

Likewise, in painting, covering and disruption are not intended to negate what has already taken shape. Their purpose is to expose the picture once again to incompletion.

Most of the creative process takes place in uncertainty.

A painting may develop in several possible directions, and every judgment alters the path it takes.

Yet during this continual adjustment, a particular moment occasionally appears: the various relations within the picture begin to support one another, forming a whole whose parts cannot easily be replaced.

At that moment, the work is no longer merely a collection of choices. It begins to reveal a structure of its own.

It begins to demand that it exist in this way rather than another.

I call this state “holding.”

To hold is not the same as to be finished.

Completion is an external concept, whereas holding is an internal condition.

A work that holds is not closed. It can still be viewed and understood anew. But it is no longer arbitrary. It possesses a centre of gravity of its own.

For this reason, knowing when to stop becomes a crucial judgment.

Continuing to work does not always make a painting better.

Once a work has begun to acquire its own structure, further intervention may instead destroy that condition.

I therefore have to judge when to stop.

Then I leave it.

After some time has passed, I look at it again.

If it can still stand over time—if, after the effects of technique, emotion, and novelty have gradually receded, it continues to maintain its own structure—then it has truly earned a reason to remain.

For me, painting is neither a process of producing images nor a process of expressing concepts.

It is closer to a gardener’s practice:

through continual adjustment, covering, disruption, waiting, and judgment, I tend the relations that are taking place within the picture.

Whether the work ultimately comes into its own does not depend entirely on my will.

It is more like an outcome that occurs by itself within the conditions that have been created.

All I do is give it the opportunity to happen.