Shifting Styles: I’ve given up on consistency
Hello friends, I hope you’re all having a wonderful start to the new year, and a peaceful January.
This month, we had a new moon in Capricorn, among many other planetary movements, and it should encourage the pursuit of new projects, given the workaholic natures of the astrological sign. And while energetically the month was a little chaotic, I still tried to take advantage of this new moon by giving myself a deadline to complete illustrating a full deck of Lenormand cards (36-card cartomancy system). It was my way to kickstart my creativity for the new year.
As someone who can’t really sit still, I’m always looking for a new project during my off-time from work. In December, I needed one that had enough boundaries and limitations that I didn’t need too much brain space, yet gave me the excuse to creatively explore. Since Lenormand cards are illustrations of a single object, it became the perfect exercise for experimenting with digital illustration.
While painting and other analogue artmaking methods were an intuitive process that was tactile and grounding for me (even watercolour, with all of its flowy and spontaneous glory, was grounding), I’ve always struggled with finding the same tactility and intuition in digital painting.
And though I’m definitely far from being done with the project (it’s only the 12th of January at the time of writing this), the few friends who’ve seen the works came back with the same comment:
“You changed your style.”
Yet I was immediately thinking “I’ve never had one.”
In Summary: 2021 & Hopes for 2022
Happy holidays, friends, I hope you’re doing well (and if you choose to continue reading, please brace yourself to the incredibly self-indulgent rant below).
Each year, whenever December comes around, time seems to pause, as though to give me the space to look back on everything that’s happened in the past twelve months. However, because of the state of the world, there’s this strangely quiet eeriness that has hovered over us since 2019, as though the year never ended since, and that everything was frozen in time.
Because in a sense, it did. No matter how relatively normal life is in Hong Kong (because “normal” is contributing and sustaining our bustling, non-stop Tetris game of capitalism), Covid halted rapidly-growing movements and triggered endless ever-changing “safety measures” and travel restrictions that no one had the space to breathe and process what had happened. How can one heal from this collective trauma when we are still in the middle of it?
Yet despite this feeling of being held hostage by Covid, 2021 was an extremely eventful year for me both personally and career-wise. And it’s a year that I hope to be a huge turning point when I look back on this year in the future.
The Four Seasons
Wrote little things about the first four paintings I made for my gallery debut.
0 The Fool
‘0 The Fool’ is a re-interpretation of the first card in a Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck. I had painted another iteration of the card in April 2019, for my now published deck, ‘L'Œil de L'Âme Tarot.’ But as we all know, April 2019 was another time and place. So many things had changed in the past two years, that when Daphne King of Alisan Fine Arts asked me to make new works for the exhibition, I felt that I wanted to use the opportunity to create a The Fool that was more aligned with what I thought the card meant to me now.
