Cia Himian Li     李 欣 芫

  To Cia Hsinyuan Lee, creation (Painting), at the initial stage during the series of 〈Netting〉was to deal with the relations, though combining lines and color blocks, between Cia and people about values, feelings and body language. It simply was self-healing and transforming which happened naturally while not knowing much yet.

  In 2004, Cia moved back to the city where she grew up. The life was different from her former life. She had not only encountered the death of family members, but also been aware of unfamiliarity to the place she used to know. Under all kinds of unexpected situations, the context of her creation had a critical change and developed to a brand new phase in which she started to discover her family pedigree and self-identity. In the past ten years, facing a variety of nonplussed predicaments and doubts and feelings unable to be expressed by words, she has transformed them into art pieces by using the photos of her family and the fairy books from her childhood as the materials. Then those art pieces present the visual documents which interpret the entanglements of herself with her memory in different time periods.

  In 2012, she decided to leave her homeland (Taiwan) for a-year-long residence in Germany, hoping to refresh her life. At the end of 2013, with expectation and joy, she came back to “Sinying”, the city where she grew up. However what she felt was not asense of belonging but alienation. She started to reflect on who has changed, what “hometown” means and what is“belonging”.

  One day, while walking on a familiar street, she was suddenly aghast at an empty place where there used to be a wall with paintings on them. The wall was painted in a painting project named “The City in Future” which she had participated in her childhood. The painted wall had been there for at least twenty years. Realizing the wall disappearing at the place was like going through a spiritual violence in the mind because of a memorable place being extirpated. Moreover, the loss of the wall was a result of the urbanization; the transfer of ownership not only changes the face of a city little by little, but also destroys the “once”. Such realization gave a big knock on her head. Then the context of her creation extended from personal issues to the trace of urban transmutation and local history.

  The presence, the absence and the disappearance during city transformation in epochs have been Cia Hsinyuan Lee’s main concern for her creation since 2014.