“I have become the theatre in which inexplicable, strange scenes are taking place.” (Resnik 2005, 158)
I would like to say that what my painting present is a dramatic scene, a stage of self-directed and self-acted dreams and memories, a stage of the unconscious.
In psychoanalysis, the place where the actors dramatize the dream is the dream stage. (Resnik 2005, 14), it makes the dream at the spatial level and allows the dreamer to represent the implicit content at the centre of stage. The notion of dream stage helps psychoanalyst build a dialogue with patients by setting a theatre where the patient is the actor at the stage and the psychoanalyst as the spectator set in the auditorium. However, in my research, I am both the actor and the audience in the dream stage, and the past self is given to the present self in a dramatic way.
In my painting practice, I kept the style I always had, and deliberately divided the picture into two parts, abstract object and background, as if the scenery of the stage had come alive. This is a play without characters, and all the settings are presented as the atmosphere of my past. These abstract objects themselves are not any representation, but the discussion between the past self and the present self about “what is the unconscious space”.
Reference
Resnik, S. (2005). The theatre of the dream: Routledge.