​Offerings from believers who survived dangerous incidents depicted in the images, ex-voto paintings are commonly seen in churches and chapels, especially in harbour cities. Often painted on wooden panels by amateurish hands with bizarre compositions, contrasted by the seriousness of telling personal stories and of being grateful to God, to the Virgin Mary and to different Saints, those paintings appear to be samples of propagating religion and faith, which made me think of communist propaganda images. While a Christian carries the notion of sin and redemption, a person under the communist ideology is constantly reminded to be grateful and loyal to the government and alerted to the imagined enemies. Disasters are always present in a totalitarian regime's narratives, for they are destined to be overcome by the regime's leadership. From this point, I started to create a series of contemporary ex-voto paintings that expresses and reflects the perspectives of a Chinese person living in the West, whose memory is piled with disastrous events: flood, pandemic, personal dramas, and most of all, political chaos—something I grew up with and can never escape from. In my ex-voto series, the concept of disaster is sometimes not specific, mixed up with a certain ambiguity, as being implicit is necessary for someone coming from a totalitarian state. I am used to expressing myself artistically through symbols, which also coincides with the means of expression in religious paintings. The themes and the role of ex-voto paintings also relate to the question of memory and address the idea of drama beyond the concept of detachment valued by our current time’s minimalism and psychological well-being by encapsulating and cherishing our collective and personal traumas. Favouring the sarcastic style of the parody both as a reflexive act on the history of ex-voto paintings and as an emotional strategy to face difficult situations, my series of ex-voto paintings expresses the intricacy and the paradoxical texture of our memory’s emotionality. I am interested in the idea of gratitude in the votive gesture that praises life as being at once simple and dramatic, and in the way painting as a medium can be used in the everyday life beyond the art market.

Being coherent with the tradition, my ex-voto paintings are painted on wooden panels—often worn-out religious icons that I found at second-hand markets. Regularly exploring second-hand markets in France, I’m fascinated by the question of the historical selection of objects and how some of them cease to be used and find a new life with new uses. This question is all the more important to me as a Chinese person because old objects and materials have become a rare sight in China where both the Cultural Revolution and the development of capitalism have violently suppressed the aesthetics of the past. The old printed wooden icons I collect and reuse to paint my ex-voto paintings raise the same issue: mass-produced items of religious memorabilia, they relate to the consumption of our cultural heritage, of what we collectively decided to retain from our history. By reusing them, I expand their story and reassert the importance of craftsmanship against capitalist mass production.

The art form of ex-voto paintings asserts the necessity to remember, to perform memorial acts and to create material things. Because they are both images and objects and because of the universal idea of disaster they carry, ex-voto paintings hold a sense of materiality and intimacy and thus concretely connect us to the abstraction of history. Their simplicity and their emotionality incite us to rethink our relation to the past and to our memory in a vibrant manner.