Artist's statement 2014

Bernadette Kam Fu Lee Pisapia

what is an artist's statement

with an answer

made only 

after

many many moments

linked together

with a love that is greater than her own soul

2015 at the seventh day of the Year of the Goat

February 7 2014

artist's statement

Color, calligrahic elements derived from the practice of chinese calligraphy, at the beginning of my research found their source of inspiration in Chinese poetry. Then it turned to poetic atmosphere, both pictorically and content wise found their source of inspiration in either eastern or western poetic realms.

The search for an atmosphere that was poetic meant to dwell on an inner holding while externalising such inner atmosphere through the use of flying lines and colors that relate in a selected tonal scale. 

When the works became less precoccupied with an approximation of tonalities, they were freer in the choice of color juxtaposition. Strong contrast of color combinations, at one point, became lines that sweep across the canvas horizontally, laying bare most of the canvas ground.

No returning to such bare and empty ground but concentrating on the watery images in colors, now both tonal as well as contrasty in the choice was the next stage of development.

Then all of a sudden, the lines elements and the colors became again simply Chinese ideograms, written in a way on canvases as if to suggest a return to the study of the Chinese characters, to begin anew the research that began with one Chinese way of expressing a line.

Such written poems were painted on one layer of transparent canvas, covered with another where Italian was written, and at one point, a layer written in German is also included. 

This playing of layerings of languages went further when I spent sometime in Canada, where a fourth layer was used, then a fifth , then a sixth. One language one layer. French, English and Objiway language were added to such complex woven of poetic play in color, as the works were inspired by an ancient Chinese poem, one that was meant to be sung, though somehow the melody got lost.

As a consequence, a performance was to accompany such forgotten song-poem by reciting it aloud, together with the audience, each with his or her language of competence. A single piece of work therefore, at such instance, was made alive by the will and participation of all.

The Rome period found myself back to a freer expression in the choice of color and lines, without too much preoccupation about ideograms or Chinese poetry. Yet another source of inspiration came in, Nature. To depict nature in an abstract expression together with an element that is more detailed observed had its source of expression in the ink paintings of Qi Bai Shi. 

Could traditional ink paintings be freely expressed abstractly on canvas was the adventure I decided to venture. Since it is not an usual practice for the Chinese painter to do life paintings, nor has he been interested in one point perspective, it could be interesting, therefore, to attempt to see reality from life, yet not from life. To paint from life yet to paint it not life-like is intriguing as a pictorial problem.

Where should the artist place his or her line of limit or non- limit interests me. In the beginning I tried to solve such pictorial problem by concentrating on the poetic atmosphere, and only lately do I attempt to tackle again the problem between abstraction and figurative depiction.

This series of works done in my garden at Rome is the beginning of my return to observation. To return to nature and observe, yet its expression might not necessarily be a perspective common to all.

We see and we do not see. We see what we would like to see. Innerly we see even more. We see also with a baggage of visual culture. Do we build ourselves on the visual culture and start from there? Or do we begin a new journey, one that is more intimate, more truly related to how we really see?

Bernadette Kam Fu Lee-Pisapia

January 28 

Rome Italy