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Grade 10: Sharing about Pursuit of Art

April 30, 2020

In the last week of April, Cher from 10(11) shared her story and experience in the world of art.

Edward Hopper once said, “If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.” To Cher, a grade 10 student currently studying visual arts at SHSID, art is a pathway to the soul. She feels that when words fail to express what colors and stokes convey, a deep-seated sub-conscious voice comes to life. For her, it started as therapy, but art soon turned into her greatest passion.

Her first encounter with painting was only about two years ago. Back in Canada, she was the only Chinese person in her jr. high school. Just that fact alone caused an identity struggle as she poured her heart out to fit in with her surroundings.

Most days after school, Cher came home, shut herself in a room, and buried the tears into her knees. One day, when she finally found the courage to reopen her eyes, a savior stood in front of her and spoke. Feeling sympathy for the solitude of her mother’s old set of acrylics, she picked up the paint brush and naturally began. Unlike most artists with a perfected technique, mastered concepts of form, composition, mood, and a trained creativity, Cher started with her mind as a blank canvas. She had no ambition or thought to follow as a guide—only a whole lot of emotion. But surprisingly, just that was enough. Cher had stepped into the realm of art. And as she would soon learn, she would never be able to get out.

From paint, to sketching, to charcoal, to collage, art freed her from stress, worry, and emotional swings. But she remarks that this is not what made her fall in love. It was the ability to create— to give birth to an atmosphere of life, movement, texture, and hope.

Last year, when she arrived in Shanghai after spending 14 years in a continent a world away, Cher’s identity was placed under transition. Her father was on the other side of the ocean, and to everyone else in this unfamiliar place, she was just a nameless face. Yet at the low points of life, the paintbrush and canvas liberated her and allowed her to be a flower popping through the concrete.

An obsession had begun. All she could think about was art— the colors, composition, she had thought it all out. As Cher says, she practically breathed art: when she was not painting, she was sketching possibilities in her head, feeling excitement that uplifted her. But Cher says that to assume all was glossy and mellow would be to flatten her experience.

The journey of painting led to many trying moments, some of which put Cher on the brink of quitting. Creation, as she mentions, is a pleasure to her, it is philosophical and cleansing. But what comes afterwards has never failed to knot her stomach. As meaningful, sensational, phenomenal, motivational, a masterpiece may be, art is a subjective field— it is defined by opinions, comments, and critiques. Cher comments that she often struggled with letting those voices delineate her; she struggled with confidence, validity, and approval.

Art taught Cher how to cope with transition and other difficulties by giving her a voice, a way to converse with an audience, not by physically meeting them, but by connecting with them through all that is metaphysical: the soul, emotions, feelings, unspeakable thoughts of the mind. Underneath its function as a tool to propagate thoughts and visions, art has become a way of life for her, shaping many of the qualities that define Cher today: perseverance, originality, innovation, ingenuity. It has given her guidance, aptitude, strength, and made Cher believe in endless possibilities.

To this day, Cher remains a firm believer of using passions and abilities to spur brilliance— to use art to communicate all that cannot be expressed following the basic rules of grammar and syntax.

(Written by Cher Yan Pictures by Cher Yan Supervised by Xie Junyu)