A g r o w I a d
A genuine reflection
on what I am doing
First Period: Childhood, family—resulting in detachment and dissociation.
Second Period: Adolescence, mental struggles, friends' suicides.
Third Period: Communism, politics, drugs, art spaces, suicide.
Fourth Period: Severe depression, recovery after a suicide attempt, three years of monotony.
Fifth Period: School, technology, music, industrial synthesizers, literature, post-trauma narratives.
Sixth Period: Beginning to reconnect with those who caused my trauma, attempting to heal.
From the moment I could remember, my first meaningful work was about the suicide of a friend—also an online partner.
I couldn’t pull them back from depression and suicidal intentions, and it left a profound psychological impact on me.
Starting from that time, art was no longer about intervening in reality but became a way to sort through and reflect on it—a reflexive act born of helplessness.
The second time I have a memory of art is after attempting to establish our own space in Shanghai—for it had become necessary—our world became too orderly, instinctively rejecting the chaos outside. The nest was a place to refuse disorder and establish clear internal rules. At the same time, writing filled the space between it and my inner concepts. All of this was tied to unspeakable words, to love and secret experiences. So for a whole half year, I stayed in my massive concrete space, writing amidst music, depression, and drugs. But I was also very young in writing, this became a set of poetry later:
After that, it felt like I stopped for a long time, though I kept journaling out of habit. But for a few months, as the space collapsed without result, my mind teetered on the edge of collapse too, lost in the chaos of many mental realms. In despair, I chose suicide. The suicide didn’t truly kill me, but my thinking regressed, my memories faded, and I entered a realm of confusion. For months, I was in a state of extreme dissociation.
If there’s a thread here, a mainline I follow in art—my artistic rule—I think my creative process is just natural. I do many practices, but what I truly recognize as art, or what inspires me to start a creation, is a clinging, an obsession—a theme that transcends moments, transcends time, an obsession that doesn’t dissipate over the years. This clinging is something I notice as soon as it’s born, and it becomes an important memoir, a record, an inscribed board, especially for the unspeakable secrets and feelings.
And most of my obsessions are about people, related to love especially.
If to integrate all of this, my life isn’t divided into stages—the token of that is just love, clinging, recording, and humbly striving to pursue the depth and the beauty of the world.
