Shupin Li / 李姝嫔

In this piece of work the girl has six ears, and it is based on the Six-Eared Macaque which is from one of the Four Great Classic Novels of Chinese literature ‘Journey to the West’. The Six-Eared Macaque is a supernatural primate who wishes to take Wukong(Monkey king)’s place in order to win all the glory by finishing the quest on his own. Being a copy of Monkey, the macaque also symbolizes the “Mind Monkey”, thereby marking their battle as an allegory for the internal struggle between the true and illusionary minds. The spirit’s death at the end represents the blossoming of One Mind. So in my works, six ears become a symbol of ‘Yin’( opposite principle is Yang).

There are uncanny similarities in the major mythological motifs and religious symbols of different civilizations. Psychologists call this Collective Unconscious. This is in addition to the personal unconscious, which is mainly composed of elements drawn from the individual’s life experiences. The Collective Unconscious contains universal elements which are inherited. It is not made up of individual unique content, but of those which are universal and of regular occurrence. Just as we have evolved biologically, we have also undergone a psychic evolution. For me, it is like a string that underlies all of human civilization. It is also about communication, the connection between two people, and that is why I use the string motif in the image to connect two children. This can also been seen in my use of hair in the new diptych work.

Many spiritual traditions around the world speak of a universal non-physical life force, likewise all cultures use the spiral motif to represent a life force. In Chinese culture this is called Chi (气), which means transformation, balance and renewal. I use spirals in my works, for example within the use of hair, water and the totems on the body. These take the form of an 's'. The 's' in the Taoist T'ai Chi symbol represents the movements of complementary Duality forces that shape nature and balance opposites. The spiral is the theme that is fundamental to the interplay of Yin and Yang.  

My work ‘Blooming’ has been inspired by Daiyu buries flowers (黛玉葬花), which is from one of the Four Great Classic Novels of Chinese literature, ‘Dream of Red Chamber’. Within this work I want to show a great tenacious soul and the force of life. This is represented in the Bamboo and Chinese hibiscus pattern in this print, where bamboo is hollow inside but hard to brake. Chinese hibiscus blooms for just 2-3 days, but this species has 300 million years of history.

Twins in my works are the symbol of duality. For me all things in the world are two. In our minds we are two— good and evil. With our eyes we see two things — things that are fair and things that are ugly… We have the right hand that strikes and the left hand full of kindness, near the heart. One foot may lead us to the evil way, the other foot may lead us to a good. So are all things two, and twins are two.

Pinocchio is a puppet who has a soul and he is undead, but in the infinite judgments the sentence ‘You are not dead’ is different from ‘You are undead.’ I am interested in the difference and complexity between the phrases ‘you are alive’ and ‘you are undead' and other notions of this. They mean something different yet they have a relationship to each other. I am interested in how this disrupts the binary way of looking at life and death, creating a third space somehow, which also corresponds to Jung’s compensation theory.

This Artist's book is about my personal memory and emotions, and from nostalgia perspective. I'm intrigued by nostalgia, it is just like a warm comfortable shell/nest/home that I keep crawling back to, because it represents some moments tender and warm that I've had. Although some people only accompany me for a period of time… I put those moments in a box, they are happy, sad, beautiful, and regretful… those that I most certainly idealize, but that truly did exist. All of those moments nurture me truly and equally. 

I want to use a red thread to reflect the ‘Yuan’（缘分，bond and fate）in Eastern philosophy. It is a relation that uses duality, and reflects upon notions of the occasional and the inevitable. We will constantly experience the separation by distance, the separation by death…but when the soul loses more and more, it also finds what is the most important, and this is what drives me like a mission.

In many novels and mythologies, some characters who come back from the dead and are the worst for wear. In some ways they are not even the same characters anymore. The body maybe moving but some aspect of the spirit is changed or transformed and they have lost something.

Surely if I spend too much time basking in what once was, I'd lose sight on what's to come. I'd lose the future if I turned back and drowned in the past. Just like Orpheus looses Eurydice when he turned to see her before returning to the world of the living. So I hid them in the shell...

But it is the present moment (today) that we live in the gentle memories of future (tomorrow).

The Greek philosopher Plato said: ‘We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.’ Children and childhood are main themes in my work. As children can be anything, they are nothing but potential. I believe it is really important to rediscover the child that we left behind as we grew up. In my opinion children can also represent the unconscious or shadowed side of humanity, a darkness that is unrealised potential.

Taoism proclaimed a purely inactive role, ‘going with the flow’, and there are many stories of sages behaving like children. This has been wrongly interpreted as self-indulgence, these sages are responding spontaneously and intuitively to the moment.