In 2014, I graduated from the China Academy of Fine Art, Hangzhou, China with a Ph.D. in Art Creation and Theoretical Research. Several students from different countries came to the class during this learning process. One was an American student who introduced me to a German female curator, who was having exhibitions in Europe and New York. My participation in these joint exhibitions let me see the creative expressions of female artists worldwide. I started to see clearly how important it is for a woman artist to have a strong, unique personal style. After graduating from the Academy, I began a period of exploration, during which I tried to create in various ways my concepts. Then after three years of experimenting with different styles, one day I started using lace as a medium. I started to develop a series of works combining lace and various textiles, creating works with strong personal and emotional characteristics. This was exactly the world of textile composite media I wanted.

The main materials of my creations are lace, different wools, embroidery thread, and transparent ribbon thread. In the early days, I used lace to emboss some lace patterns and then drew some concrete or abstract figures to organize my semi-figurative work. I then experimented with lovely, deformed half-figured female pieces to which I added partial lace collage effects. The work presented a fairytale-like, delicate, and lovely effect. Then, in 2017, I tried collaging women's shapes with lace, I next painted the shapes, after adding thick Styrofoam glue on top, and finally stirring the glue to give it a blurry effect. This process of creation, because of the Styrofoam, and the effects of the glue plus the delicate lace materials gave the women in the picture a sense of fantasy. Next, I then came up with the idea to use flowers, a lot of flowers, I used them to form a woman, in the hair, body, the face, it changed this image of a woman into a flower. She became flowery, both slender and graceful. I called her “Flora of the East”. Flora is the goddess of love and beauty and is reminiscent of the women in Botticelli's work "Spring" and the women the Pre-Raphaelites artist loved to paint, the beautiful, melancholy, dreamy women with thick flowing hair. Flowers are beautiful and they also have the function of propagating reproduction in botany. One could say that efficacy is feminine in nature. The women organized by these flowers represent women’s self-observation and reflection

of their bodies. It is the inner strength of women’s self-confidence and self- determination. The flowers in my paintings are firm, not weak.

What I wanted to do was create a modern female role model. Today’s modern women know more about self-independence than traditional women. They don't feel lonely because of being alone. For them, happiness is to seek from within. And the contemporary digital age makes it easier for women to enjoy themselves in solitude. The digital age has both enriched our relationships and complicated them, the power of the Internet is self-evident every day. Knowledge, learning, and a strong network of people make it easier for women to learn to live with themselves and enjoy themselves, so I dress up women with lace and even help them make lace clothes to express their joy in life and their new psychological state.

In two thousand nineteen, I began a brand-new period for my lace creation. This new series of works adds custom-made 0.7 cm lace to the painting, which forms the outer edge of the object I create, and then I use various colored threads (mainly wool threads and embroidery threads of different thicknesses) to express the light and shade and color of the object, above which is pasted a crooked transparent ribbon line. The picture formed by these lines is flowing and has a strong sense of movement, they are a relief, a figure of repeated characters in the composition. Most of these characters have a sense of movement, and the repeated use of graphics shows a continuous sense of movement. The woman’s hair is long and floats around in a weightless state. These bodies are winding and twisting lines and their long hair creates a feeling like the concept of the “qi” movement seen in Chinese culture. The dynamics of this kind of character are powerful, and they refer to the mental state of women, and the cycle of reciprocation. It is spiritual meditation, and the dynamics and strength of lines and hair show the strong spiritual power of women.

The repeated images of people in my composition also represent the relationship between a woman and the people around her. In the digital age, most people spend a lot of time in the digital world, and we spend less time in contact with people in real life. I want to express this state, so I present repeated characters in the picture. The distance between these characters is close, but I use transparent ribbon lines to represent their transparent protective net. This barrier between inner space and outer space shows their slightly alienating relationship, but the transparent ribbon used in my picture also shows that the

relationship between the characters and the outside world is not impenetrable, because the material of the transparent ribbon line is transparent, only slightly on the top with a light color. In this translucent state, the characters have a sense of penetration, not completely self-enveloping, and do without making any connection with the outside world. Meaning that they are still amiable rather than completely detached. I use these dynamic continuous patterns to show that the women in the picture sometimes slowly move to the real world, and sometimes penetrate the online world. This kind of dynamic life is full of fun and makes contemporary women's lives more colorful. Their lives are full of fantasies, and these fantasies are the real life of these women, they are like dreams. This is also my interpretation of contemporary women. Flowers weave fantasies and dreams, and life in the digital age seems unreal like an illusion. However, this is our real life. That's why I named this exhibition “Illusion and Reality”. The title expresses the magnificent way of existence of contemporary women.