From the beginning to the end 

I made a long oil paintings, I hope through the canvas it can show my own Christian faith, for me, god created the universe is a very great，impayable thing, since the genesis of the bible, it says that In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And God let there be  light, there is day and night , also have life and love. The first part of my painting , I want to show the creation of god, the sun the moon and stars, human being, all life are from god. So I paint the giant hands which making the sun and the moon .At first I put this pair of human ancestor Adam and Eve to draw out, but then I want to use more symbol, more ways to express, so I use a pile of dust to represent  Adam, then use a rib to represent Eva, as mentioned in genesis.

 

The second part, I want to paint just as Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, God has been with the pillar of cloud and pillar of fire led them, never leave. Because they don't have enough faith ，caused they wander around in the wilderness areas for forty years, then walked out of the wilderness of Egypt, into the land of Canaan which is the place where God has promised to give them. For me, may everyone in your life will feel something like this, even if we know what is your target, we still could get confused, feel the fear of the future, or for Christians, we know to live is to glorify God ，to live out the style of Christ, but when we face the daily life, we may still hesitate and be at a loss. We do not know how to choose and have no direction. Therefore, in the second part, I put many figures of people，but each of them is a single individual, with no dependence. The mountain in the picture is Mount Sinai, the mountain where God spoke to Moses and laid the decalogue, and it also symbolizes our destination, even though we know the mountain is there, we can see it but still can get lost and get tired.In this part, I have a reference to Greco's The opening of the fifth seal ，the characters in his painting some happy, some panic-stricken ，but all have very strong emotions, and the atmosphere of the whole picture is a mysterious ，strong feeling to represent the end of the world. In my painting I do not want to paint faces and expressions of people, because being lost, being lost is a very common theme, everyone may experience it, so it does not matter who they are, and I even blurred their gender to achieve this though.

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I deliberately remove and blur the identities of the characters in this painting , which I also used to do in my previous works. I painted some people without specific features, without eyeballs, without identities, insignificant or so-called invisible. It might be related to my own personality, because I am the kind of person who wants to be invisible in a group, not to attract attention, not to express opinions, therefore maybe everyone in my painting can represent myself, or anybody who existed in the society. I placed a people who holding a candle and walking in the rain，the inspiration comes from the film of Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalgia, he told us a story of an old Soviet man in Italy wanted to go home but can not go back, so he asks another Soviet carried a candle in water, walks from one side to the other, the director repeated three times this action, again and again, this part is touched me. Therefore, I also placed a person with a candle in his hand and protect the candle in my painting, because Nostalgia expressed a person who wants to go home. For Christians, only heaven is our real home, and we are strangers on the earth. However, it is not easy to hold on faith, just like protecting the candle from being extinguished in the rain. But just like this character in Nostalgia, he finally succeeded. The candle is light and hope. This is what I look forward to myself, try to protect and hold on to my faith even in difficult times.

 

At the beginning and the end of the painting, I painted some symbolic things. Such as dust, rib, river of blood, stars falling on the ground, because I want to centralize the part of the character in the middle area, firstly in order to show the visual center, and secondly for the purpose of expressing some actions that human beings make to restore the relationship with God, trying to move towards the direction of God. All the characters in my painting are looking into the distance or staring at the ground, none of them are looking directly at the audience or looking at the front. In order to create a sense that I am not here, the place I want to be is not here,  my mind is in the distance. Which may be similar to existentialism. Existentialism holds that the existence experienced by people is the cause of the formation of human essence, which is formed in specific historical circumstances. One of the essential purposes of existentialism is to pay attention to the importance of the individual. However, it should be noted that existentialism is not an individualist. Existentialism stresses explaining society from the perspective of individuals. Existentialism attaches importance to human experience and feelings, which are the evidence of our existence.