Confucius is a fraud and I wish I knew that sooner

Exhibited in Art Express 2020 - Oil Painting on Canvas

"Confucius is a Fraud and I wish I knew that sooner"

My body of work expresses a personal disillusionment with conservative Chinese values that are, in my own experience, too polarised to reconcile with my experience as a second-generation immigrant. I have explored the resultant profound anxiety and self-hatred through the appropriation of religious imagery, using the division between heaven and hell, and the image of Confucius, whose teachings are engraved on the consciousness of every East-Asian person. The work represents how the traditional values that emphasise societal conformity and filial piety, resulting in the unambiguous distinction between moral and immoral, become a condemnation of individual expression.