Image above: Jingwei Bu, ‘Life Maps – Wandering in Memories of 4 years Old Crossed the Creek Found Wild Berries Sleepy Snails’ (detail), 2021, pencil and acrylic on paper as an outcome of time-based performance. 88 x 68cm. Photo courtesy the artist.
Life Maps
Jingwei Bu
14 March – 14 July 2022
CCH Gallery at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital
Jingwei Bu is an emerging artist who makes time-based works utilizing multiple approaches, including drawing, painting, installation and art performance. Bu’s practice is a mindful collaboration with time itself. The works represent the passage of time by incorporating observations and occurrences from everyday life.
In her ongoing Life Map series, Bu uses drawing and mark-making as a way of externalizing her inner life, a representation of the life journey with accumulated reflections of joy and suffering.
She approaches the making of these drawings in the spirit of time-based performance. Allocating each drawing a period of several hours, and working her way around the sheet, her drawings document life journey into memory, reflection and philosophical questioning.
The quality of the mark-making – from intense repetitive lines, to spiral forms, number sequencing, and the action of removing and covering – evoke a highly personal and idiosyncratic system of thought.
Through them Bu explores her innate curiosity, sensitivity and capacity for immersion and invites viewers to share in the process and result; a hard-won schematic of the soul. This mindfulness and reflective quality of the drawing process has the potential to lift the wellbeing of the audience.
My Life Maps series, initiated in 2015, is an ongoing artistic investigation into the representation of human experience using simple lines, marks and numbers in a continuous action of drawing. The finished result can strongly reveal the life experience as a journey that not allows to regret but to appreciate then reflect. The intensive dark dots, and heavy marks may represent the hard time they have been through, and the smooth flowing lines may remind the viewer their joys in the pass journey. As an exhibition in the hospital space, the resonance can help the patient and their relatives to see their hard time more positively, to understand life in a different perspective.
Jingwei Bu, 2022
Jingwei Bu, ‘Life Maps – Ping An / Safe and Sound’, 2020. Photo courtesy the artist.
Jingwei Bu, ‘Life Maps-intuition #7’, 2019. Photo courtesy the artist.
Jingwei Bu, ‘Life Maps-intuition #5’, 2019. Photo courtesy the artist.
Jingwei Bu, ‘Life Maps - Mindfulness Walking #6’, 2021. Photo courtesy the artist.
Jingwei Bu, ‘Life Maps – Wandering.', 2021. Photo courtesy the artist.
Jingwei Bu, ‘Life Maps - No Matter What, Let’s Move on’, 2020. Photo courtesy the artist.
Jingwei Bu, ‘Life Maps – Ping An / Safe and Sound’, 2020. Photo courtesy the artist.
Jingwei Bu, ‘Life Maps-intuition #7’, 2019. Photo courtesy the artist.
Jingwei Bu, ‘Life Maps-intuition #5’, 2019. Photo courtesy the artist.
Jingwei Bu, ‘Life Maps - Mindfulness Walking #6’, 2021. Photo courtesy the artist.
Jingwei Bu, ‘Life Maps – Wandering.', 2021. Photo courtesy the artist.
Jingwei Bu, ‘Life Maps - No Matter What, Let’s Move on’, 2020. Photo courtesy the artist.
