The game of go is an ancestral Chinese strategy game; it was also my father's favorite game. Starting from essential elements of form in Chinese calligraphy (line and round) and symbolic forms of Chinese culture (round sky, square earth), I worked with ink and watercolor to illustrate the evolution of two groups of black/red pieces from a state of emptiness to a balance of fullness, passing through an inevitable phase of confrontation and chaos.
Red is my father's family, revolutionary peasants engaged from the beginning in the Red Army, for some of them from childhood, experiencing a social ascension in the new China.
To this hope opposes the black of my mother's family, intellectuals and fallen bourgeois. Officials of the former government of Chiang Kai-shek, they are considered as a "black root" with a disastrous destiny during the Cultural Revolution, the younger ones denying this black family and painting themselves red to survive.
The fluidity of the materials acted as a catalyst and liberator of these memories.
