The recent piece that I did is part of my theme of internal contradictions. I was inspired by a Japanese artist called Yue, who uses light shades of pencil and splashes of tea as background to create a mysterious and harmonic feel to her works. Since I accidentally spilled coffee on my last piece and the color of the coffee stains end up improving the visual effect of that piece, I decided to experiment with pouring tea on my recent piece. The tea background came out in a pretty nice and warm tone, and goes well with the pencil lines. However, my inexperience in using tea caused the background to lack color difference and depth, which is what I was hoping to achieve. Though I used some watercolor to improve the background, it is still kind of dull.

Apart from trying to use tea, I also tried using sketch lines to complete elements on the background instead of using refined lines as I have always done. I was scared to try this technique at first, but realized that these lines successfully created emphasis on the main objects and gave the background a nice texture.

For this piece I was aiming to express the coexisting evil and innocence. Both figures in the piece is part of myself. The adult figure is going through a transformation towards becoming a Hanya, which is a female Japanese monster. Hanyas are originally innocent females, but becomes evil after possessing strong envy and hatred. The little girl represents innocence. The hanya knows that the little girl will one day become like her and wants to prevent this from happening, but could not stop the process. I wanted to express myself being exposed to and falling toward evil, but the innocence still exists. I am tempted by evil and will become a monster, but at the same time I don’t want to become a monster and want the innocence to stay.