Paintings_2025

Manufactured Thorns visualizes how individuals develop defensive mechanisms under the pressure of social systems. The central figure stands in silent resistance as spikes emerge from their shoulders, spine, and head—not as weapons, but as the residue of survival.

The spines are sharp, blood-streaked, and systematically arranged, suggesting repeated trauma and conformity under duress. The collage background is composed of real English and Chinese news headlines from the past three years, referencing themes such as corruption, surveillance, war, and economic decay. These fragments create a visual wall of social noise—dense, contradictory, and overwhelming.

Two photographic hands intrude from the top corners. The one on the left offers a thorn, while the one on the right, clad in a suit, points in judgment. Together they represent the systemic construction and reinforcement of pain: one imposes it, the other institutionalizes it.

This canvas isn’t a painting — it’s a wound.
It’s called “Pain”, and it holds parts of me I didn’t know how to say out loud.The heavy red in the bottom right corner was carved with a palette knife — the way I once carved into my own skin. Those aren’t brushstrokes. They’re scars, remembered.

In the two red triangles on the right, I mixed in my own blood. Not for shock. Just because paint wasn’t enough. My pain was too real, too physical, too much to only be symbolized. It had to literally be part of me.

I didn’t paint this to be beautiful. I painted it to survive.
Every mark is chaos. Collapse. A scream without sound.
This is a monument to my depression, my bipolar episodes, my time away from school when everything broke.
It’s messy. It’s heavy. It’s unfinished.
But so was I.