Athena Bing He
Artist Statement:
​
As a Chinese woman artist on a journey, all my creative thinking has been filtered through a sieve of labyrinthine circumstances that include my Chinese upbringing that began in the Mao revolutionary period, my very strict education in China, my few years of "freedom" as an art student in the top art school in Beijing, my "political" departure from China after the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989, and eventually my migration to the United States. I am presenting specifically a female story told through visual narratives of my own fabrication that contain both truths and fiction that are meant to foster awareness through their plausibility. These visual narratives express and convey a unique and compelling content that include concepts of culture and beauty, memory and loss, femaleness and feminist issues, patriarchy and equality, history and myth, motif and symbolism, self and identity, psychology and physicality, and most significantly, ruins and fragmentation as theoretically introduced to me by the art historian, Wu Hong.1
​
As a pictorial painter, I am re-presenting metaphorically and discursively a world of my own fabrication through the employment of contemporary Eastern and Western ideas of the collage aesthetic as well as traditional processes of myth-making and story telling. Quality in my work is paramount and is developed through my acquisition and maintenance of technical virtuosity and skill, which also enables the freedom to explore my imagination visions and artistic passions.
​
I am also very attuned to the now, and with honesty and sincerity, I use me work to reflect on current issues that includes topics brought to the fore by the #MeToo movement, the sorry state of political and governmental affairs, and the apparent global corruption that seems to permeate every aspect of human existence. Also, I see the power of money generally obscuring our involvement in and experiencing of art. The dollar sign rules while diminishing our ability to truly see and value art. However, I know that being born into a bad time is not an excuse for making bad art.
​
March 2019
​
1. Hung, Wu. A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012.