Athena Bing He

 

Artist Statement

 

                  First and foremost, I believe that one should always follow their heart and their vision as an artist.  Making art for me is having an intimate conversation with this life.  This existence we have on this planet is short but also beautiful.  It is sometimes sorrowful, and often we find ourselves lost as we wander through the experiences life presents us.

 

                  Presently, I see the power of money obscuring our experiencing of art.  The dollar sign rules while diminishing our ability to truly "see" art.  However, being born into a bad time is not an excuse for making bad art. 

                 

                  In these paintings and drawings I am, of course, interested in utilizing my skills effectively. But I wish to go beyond just technique and skill.  My aim is to express a unique and compelling content through the figure and through portraiture.  Unavoidably, this content is being developed and confounded by my life experiences, which are complicated and labyrinthine.  All my thinking has been and is filtered through a sieve of circumstances that include my Chinese upbringing that began in the Mao revolutionary period of time, my very strict education in becoming an artist and 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 migrating to the USA with my son.  I established a teaching gallery in Tarrytown that would also serve as a studio so that I could paint and where I could effectively communicate with a wider community. During this time of bringing up my son as a single parent, experiencing the premature loss of my husband from cancer, and struggling as a new immigrant in a very different society and culture, this personal process that continues to challenge me, has also served to strengthen my commitment as an artist.  Through all these experiences and more, I am pleased that my dream has never died.  I have followed my heart and my vision.

 

                  I am a "traditional" painter but not a conservative thinker. The challenge I spoke of before has affected and prescribed my line of thought, demanding from me openness to the plethora of art out there. Through the process of my own work and the contemplative provocation it imposes from painting to painting, I understand better this contemporary world, and more effectively evaluate it with some reasoned thought.  Reflecting on and using my past experiences as legitimate criteria for moving forward in developing a series of narratives from personal perspectives about this world we live in, I have revealed in each work, with a specific intent, a disclosure of my deepest feelings about human kind as I perceive it. 

           

                  My most recent oil painting series is entitled "Masks of Eternity."  My drawing and watercolor series is entitled "Insight."  We all walk through this world not as we are, but as we want others to see us.  We realize the incompetence of the mirror in divulging our self and choose instead the mask, a way to see outside of ourselves without disclosing who we really are.  We are born without it, but very quickly we learn that the only way to be "known" is to put the mask on, to disguise the true self in favor of the created self.  In that way, we are all artists. In these works, I have revealed the dilemma posed here, asking the viewer to meditate on their self relative to the experience of living.  The confrontation is moderate in that I am not asking for the viewer to choose.  I am simply suggesting ways of "seeing" existence.

 

                  I paint and draw from life accordingly, choosing models that evidence a look of truth behind the mask they are wearing, a vulnerability that perhaps they are not even aware of, but trusting in my instincts, I proceed to draw and, if I find it is true in my estimation, to paint them.  Placing them into a narrative of my construction, using my skills of observation and technique, I dig deep into introspective readings and personal feelings about the human psyche, making every effort to reveal the model's special and rare characteristics in the process of disclosing indicators of identity, collective and shared cultures, individual personality, world community and collective problems of living this human existence we all live.  I seek a metaphoric understanding, initially captured through intrigue with observational "realism," the kind that was practiced by the "masters," but ultimately, by way of thought and questioning of our collective human condition.  Each painting is representative not of a figure, but of an ongoing search for vital meaning.

 

September 5, 2014