Tibetan Medicine Series

Text: Zhong Ting

During the 2020 pandemic, Xiong Wenyun accompanied her sick mother throughout the latter’s hospital stay. The hospital smelled of illness, pain and death. The artist’s observations of hospitals, patients, diseases, life, and death combined with her individual unique life experience (especially the influence of Tibetan culture). She then recorded these observations in the form of abstract paintings which she painted on the back of medicine boxes. After her mother was discharged from the hospital, she began to paint in larger format upon easels, re-experiencing in the process an eternal cycle of birth and death.

Xiong Wenyun uses heavy colors and shadows to express her emotions, many straight lines, windows, and other elements, as if revealing her desire to restore order to a chaotic and repressed environment. Tibet is the habitat of her soul, and the combination of Tibetan culture, medicine, and hospital elements makes it possible for these works to express a full human experience. It can be said that this series is a metaphor for the integration of Xiong Wenyun’s embodied individual life into her environment.

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

Walls seem to be a metaphor for protection and authority. The artist is full of the fear of disease and death. In the spiritual world, these indescribable fears are transformed into images which appear in her paintings. She built a wall in the spiritual world to protect her life and her boundaries. Above the city wall, there appears a significant black color, as if implying the nothingness between reality and illusion, whereby the artist is missing some important part of her soul, feeling helpless and lost.

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

Compared with Tibetan Medicine Ⅰ, Tibetan Medicine Ⅸ addresses Tibetan cultural life as a meditation on pain. The black void is filled with red life energy, white squares and shadow parts are replaced with rainbow ribbons, and red walls are exchanged for the blue and purple of spirituality and wisdom. She begins to soothe anxiety and restore calm. Rainbow ribbons resemble the costumes of the Tibetan people. The artist finds a spiritual home in Tibetan culture. Perhaps she is no longer attached to Śūnyatā (Buddhist terminology meaning emptiness). Under the influence of Tibetan Buddhism, she finds the meaning of “emptiness” to achieve transcendence of her individual life.

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

The red and white lines on the wall are indicative of the artist looking for spiritual support to break through a demanding situation. Now she is depressed and seeking motivation to go on with her life.

Piece Description:

Text: Xiong Wenyun

At the beginning of 2022, my 93-year-old mother passed away. During this period, many extraordinary events broke out at home and abroad, and my creative state was plunged into an abyss of extreme emotions. I suffer from the same fear of illness and death as everyone else. However, despite this overflow of emotion, I must maintain a high degree of rational control over the structure and color of my paintings. For me, the creation of Western Medicine series is more about understanding the structure of modern scientific design, while the process of creating Tibetan Medicine series concerns the experience of a cycle of life and death.

Text: Zhong Ting

The white squares are like energy forms of the spirit or soul, released from the body to float between life and death. Throughout the Tibetan medicine series, there are shadows under these small white squares, seeming to imply that the individual has not perished, that the soul or spiritual energy body flows onward, transforming, even changing its color throughout different points of memory, experiencing or reproducing the life state of the artist in her different periods of human and non-human existence.

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

The life energy of the individual flows to the edge of life and death. From the illusion of calm there arises a curiosity to explore. The world of death is mysterious, and so is the world of life. It’s as if an unknown force has emerged to draw a sharp line between life and death.

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

We can’t tell whether the window is facing inwards or outwards, whether we are inside or outside it. Behind the desire for peace is the elusive deep sea of the subconscious mind called “destiny.”

Piece Description:

Text: Xiong Wenyun

In the days and nights of the first anniversary of my mother’s death in early 2023, these concrete and transcendent scenes played out incessantly, in which I experienced the last hours before death, and greeted the salvation of my soul in the illusion of this. Repeatedly, however, the act of seeking expressive symbols for my paintings pulled me back to harsh reality.