J: I heard you were in fashion & textile before. Did it influence your painting?
F: Of course, I started the journey from making paintings of the wardrobes.
J: You were born in Malaysia, now studies in London. How did the media of Chinese art come to be interesting to you? How did you get involved in it?
F: I started learning the simplified Chinese characters since the age of 5. The teacher, who was my late grandmother would sit with me for the writing exercises; where I used to repetitively write the same character for many times. The exercises trained my left hand. It helped to develop my own way of writing and painting. Like…to make a horizontal stroke, I would push the brush instead of pulling the brush.
J: Interesting. Fuen, it might be good to explain how and why you engage storytelling to the Chinese pictographic writing system.
F: Because of the discovery of a simplified Chinese character in a poem from 1235... from the Song Dynasty. It was a big surprise for me. It means the character has been used since 1235. So, I carried on exploring the etymology of this character.
J: Why did you paint on the wall?
F: I saw traditional Chinese characters engraved on a large rock at Pearson Square, London. It is just 10mins walk from Oxford circus station. It reminded me of the Chinese characters on the tortoise plastron as well as those on the Nanjing city wall. These inspired me to paint the etymology of a character on the wall for the exhibition.
J: I heard you will undo this painting this Friday. Is that true? And why?
F: Yes, I will undo the painting this Friday. Just to demonstrate that, unlike those characters on the tortoise plastron, Nanjing city wall and the rock at Pearson Square, the void happened in the writing system because certain characters had short life and never been archived or been archived but did not survive the cultural revolutions. A lot of Chinese characters just disappeared and missing the etymology. A Chinese scholar - Da Zheng once urged that ‘The Cultural Revolution was a massive destruction of culture and tradition, among which was calligraphy'!
