My Mona Lisa…
On April 27th, 2020, at 1:30 in the middle of the night, I painted the last cube of my oil painting Mona Lisa, completing the nearly two-month reclusion —removing myself from society— to complete the painting process in solitude. I was exhausted. I struggled to drive home from the studio, dropped my body onto the bed, and fell sound asleep instantly.
On the psychological and spiritual level, it took me a few months, starting from adjusting my emotions and then various material and spiritual preparations, until I completed this complicated work.
The oil cube style painting is the opposite of the traditional way of oil painting. Like playing golf, the farther you want to hit, the harder you have to control your strength. In the fiery artistic enthusiasm, I used the most rational way, like writing calligraphy, to make the cubes as square as possible with an oil brush. I repeated this simple action 12,376 times to complete this painting. I was lucky that the long-term concentration on discovering and creating color cubes didn’t drive me insane. Maybe I was crazy that I just didn't know it myself. Therefore, the psychological and mental preparation required for this process is relatively long. The reclusion started right away when I calmed down and experienced the joy of cube making in an area the size of a fingernail piece by piece, like ants occupying a colony. Reclusion means shutting myself off from going outdoors to participating in activities, including social gatherings. It is a necessary process that I use to adjust my psychology to the level of painting and fully devote myself to work. Any contact with the outside world can break up the concentration of creation and overall mood.
The Mona Lisa is 86 inches high and 55 inches wide. It consists of a total of 12,376 cubes. I spend ten to fifteen hours a day in the studio, except for meals and a few short breaks at different times, all painting or cultivating the mood of such labor. It took nearly two months to complete the artwork. Although the process of each work is the same, the mental and physical delivery is equally challenging for me. However, looking back at this Mona Lisa, things that happened in the creation have never been experienced when I created other works, so I call it a miracle.
