Nearby Is the Country They Call Life
毗鄰有個國度，名叫生活
Oil, ash, cement, sand, acrylic, and emulsion on canvas
Diptych, 160 x 80cm (each) x 2, 2025
Puer Aeternus 永恆少年
For Puer Aeternus (Eternal Youth)––the archetype that has kept me naive, idealistic, and believing
Oil on canvas, 160 x 80cm
Aug. 30, 2025
Caught in the negative pole of the mother complex, I am often overtaken by the Puer Aeternus, the so-called Peter Pan syndrome. I’m incapable of living in the here and now, always yearning for something higher. My adult life has been a prolonged struggle to escape the “devouring mother”––both in her personal and cultural forms––and to wrestle with matter itself (matter–mater–mother). I wonder how much of this “illness” is mine alone, and how much belongs to the collective. Is it a curse, or a disguised blessing? (A question that haunted me already in The Inferior Predator)
Rereading The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
It dawns on me that Tomas’s vitality lies in the conflict: the tension between Don Juan’s promiscuous freedom and Tristan’s binding fidelity is what has kept him alive. Lightness and weight are both unbearable; the way lies in between.
Perhaps my own struggle with the Puer is another form of this tension––the pull between transcendence and grounding, escape and engagement, illusion and reality, art and kitsch.
Before selling my work, I want first to show it on influential, public-facing platforms. That makes reaching out necessary. After years of retreat, I’ve begun to reach outward this year. So far it has meant little more than letters to the “art world,” but even that has been torturous. At times a single email consumes an entire day, half a bottle of wine, and two more days of recovery before I can return to painting. And yet, to my surprise, the struggle has made me grow. The very tension between “reaching outward” and “working inward” has brought more structure and purpose to my life.
“Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit.” Whatever is merely positive is lifeless. Negativity has always been essential to my art, and it now seems essential to my life––my vitality. Lightness and weight, curse and blessing—perhaps what matters is not to escape the opposition, but to inhabit it fully.
Nobody 沒人
After Auguste Rodin’s The Walking Man
Oil, ash, cement, sand, acrylic and emulsion on canvas
160 x 80cm, 2025
The Street
by Octavio Paz
Here is a long and silent street.
I walk in blackness and I stumble and fall
and rise, and I walk blind, my feet
trampling the silent stones and the dry leaves.
Someone behind me also tramples, stones, leaves:
if I slow down, he slows;
if I run, he runs
I turn :
nobody.
Everything dark and doorless,
only my steps aware of me,
I turning and turning among these corners
which lead forever to the street
where nobody waits for, nobody follows me,
where I pursue a man who stumbles
and rises and says when he sees me:
nobody.
Details include Labubu dressed as 🍉, Medusa, “evian” (read backwards 😉), and the famous “hat” from The Little Prince (a classic Puer)—revealed as a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant, the self devoured by the Mother, as interpreted by Marie-Louise von Franz in The Problem of the Puer Aeternus.
