Atin Yeo’s take on Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” 1948

The

“Christina’s Burden is a study on representing despair combining colourful bright pastel and neon palettes, this being a general description of how I perceive the world these days.

Many reoccurring elements that are becoming more noticeably present in my past to recent works, such as indiscriminate application of colours, shapes, text, and even entire faces coincides with the appearance of anchors in my own life, as the flurry of chaos and instability across every dimension of my human existence has left me in a weird state of desensitised desperation.

This painting in particular had intentional use of colour scattering and text, and to briefly sum up, 雅樂 Yáyuè and Confucian values ascribes no place for the full unadulterated beauty of the world as it is, basically positing that existence has a “right way” of existing and that music has the power to evoke too many of the “wrong” emotions despite how senseless it should seem to assign morality to vibrations of air. Despite the merits this philosophical theory may have with simpleminded children in need of external providence of control and regulation, I feel that the unwillingness of men to explore the infinite unlocked by creativity continues to bind humankind to two-dimensionality, a requirement no living creature, material, or even atomic molecule could possibly fulfill.

As with the increasing tension between harmonious aesthetics and emotionally indiscernible and chaotic rendering of random anythings, I’ve resigned myself to the inevitability of persecution by mere existence, but even so I refuse to stop existing.

Christina‘s burden to me is the dark and ominous house in the distance, not wanting to see a world in ashes but unable to prevent its fate. When the overbearing shadow of obsolete instructions crumbles, it would no longer be a crime to exist, appreciate, or create.

Something like that, but also I subtly hint to the consuming nature of the universe and how I understand the fact that things like Confucian values emerged in the first place in order to circumvent entropy for as long as we need in order to progress, neither supports our existence but I think the least we can do is not to kill each other over it since we all will be consumed in the end haha” - Atin Yeo, 2022