Drawing on themes of memory, time, and contemplation, I convey in my paintings the personal yet uncanny moments of mundane life that often go unnoticed. They are a recollection of bitterness and freedom from my childhood in the Yangtze River village, as well as a sense of solitude and anxiety in the present. Rather than depicting a specific story, these figurative paintings seek to evoke the experience of gazing at and meditating on things as we go about our lives. The references to memory both create and alienate the contemplative object, suggesting again and again that the distance between the past and the present is the place where meaning is made. Gazing at the objects in my paintings becomes a self-imposed gaze of existence and a perpetual meditation on love and loss. With fragmentary references to life in unclear time and place, the works evoke a yearning for introspection about oneself and existence. The mingling of memory and the present with image and reality awakens the tender and melancholic sentiments we experience in our spiritual longing.