The movie Attila Marcel(2013) unfolds the story over Madame Proust's alluring garden of herbs. In her garden, a cup of tea(a mysterious concoction with a madeleine on the side) can transport one to the past. Paul, the main character, doesn’t have a clear memory of his parents. He misses them so much so he visits Madame’s garden every day and returns to his childhood to see his parents. Throughout his journey he runs across his prejudiced misunderstandings toward his family, and discovers the truth. This even gets him out of his gloomy reticence. The movie was lovely, yet intimidating. I was afraid to face the truth, steeped in my distorted memories. I just wanted to delight in Cherry cokes, just like Paul's aunts who are satiated with the moment. However, I’ve always been preoccupied with the past, lingering on old memories. The images in my paintings are the reproduction of my personal experience, with the 'memory' against the 'actual event', or vice versa. The certain memory that underlies a painting often evaporates or is distorted the day after. The image is consistently peeled off and then supplemented, through the course of erasure and reconstruction. An actual experience often leaves only an ‘atmosphere’, and the memory of it hovers around me as some still images. Only through a photo I can insist on its existence and confess its authenticity. All the dialogues and emotions are flattened into a piece of photograph. The scenery and still life in such a photograph evoke a particular person; that particular image speaks for him. In my memory, his glass was lucid and shiny. Would he have thought that my glass was empty? Inside a photograph, I find clusters of those who are eliminated and those to be eliminated, as well as those who left and those who remain. I’ve struggled to stay distant from those once-brilliant photos. Photographs and memories are never compatible. One still image may contain a scene from an event, but only as a visual reproduction and not explain the circumstances. Where the context is removed, the leftover emotion is objectified into a figure and is imprinted flat on the surface. Such imprinted images are then reorganized in harmony, and my gaze also lingers upon the texture and color of the smushed cake. Mingling my memory with the images I received from my friends, I begin to focus more on the action of painting. The memory of the cliché conversations(perhaps from my imagination), hackneyed sentences, and the scenes probably from the novels of the 90s… It is a residue of my emotion to be evaporated soon, an awkward truth that I have to inevitably face at any moment, and is like a madeleine that I never had a chance to take a bite. Talking about myself through my painting is like picking up the ashes with a poker. Once again I pick up the firestone that still flames up at times, cool it down with a blow, then split it into pieces, awaiting to show it out before long. And perhaps, that piece will look just like Cherry Coke, bitter and sweet.