Xingnan Sang

Reflection

I did ten portraits of people in a very loose state and integrated clothing and textiles with their body movements. These are my sketches of different people in the street. I don’t realistically depict people, but I add my imagination to them and depict them. It is a kind of expressionism. I throw ink on the paper to express the element of speed, and adding speed to the picture helps me capture a certain literary quality of people in a dynamic world.

For example, in one of my paintings, there is a woman in a colourful fur coat; I used pink and bright yellow, her hair flying, and she exudes a queenly air. But underneath the coat is naked flesh, and she covers her breasts and buttocks only with very fragile ribbons. Was she perhaps more like a whore than a queen? But so what? The sacred and the flirty are one in her, and she does away with any singular definition of female identity through this contrasting way of dressing.

I also painted the artist playing the accordion in the street and used the method of grid topography to make the accordion very large. The accordion is like his skirt, and he’s playing this ‘melodic skirt’ with concentration. The hemline resembles a musical instrument, as I usually experience when wearing dresses. Lace hemlines are typically formed by repeating cut-out patterns, like the keys of a piano. At the same time, they have a draping effect, and as I move my legs, the different lace units bump into each other like bells clashing against each other and making a crisp sound.