1

Last winter before leaving Boston, I bought a book named Art as Therapy.In it, the author Alain de Botton mentioned the first function of art is remembering.

It was snowing that day.I found a warm place to sit, opened its first page and was captivated by the story told by this painting below.

"Dibutades Tracing the Portrait of a Shepherd" 1786.

A young couple who were much in love had to part, and, in response, the woman decided to trace the outline of her lover's shadow. On the left the dog looked up at her, reminding us of fidelity and devotion. She made an image so that, when he had gone, she would be able to keep him more clearly and powerfully in her mind. The precise shape of his nose, the way his locks curl, the curve of his neck and the rise of his shoulder will be present to her when he is miles away...

She might not be a painter, but love got her motivated to make that line drawing.

I'm not a big fan of classic oil paintings as when art was still realistic and objective, it was easier to answer what it is supposed to represent. And they can't evoke my curiosity.

But this painting only resonated with me in that winter.

I don't ever want to forget the way you look tonight. ---I.Jean-Baptiste Regnault

The desire to hold on to things we love when they are gone is so genuine and beautiful in spite of that our bad memory may finally let it go.

At a balmy summer night, I guess I understood what Alain de Botton said that our minds are troublingly liable to lose valuable information, of both a factual and a sensory kind.

With the fast pace of modern life, we've got so much more ways to remember and forget.

Painting responses to the consequences of forgetting. I still appreciate the moments we've to get stirred up to record love in this holy way.

2

Now, Modern Art confronted with abstractions. Countless numbers of images appear in the head of the viewers with entirely new associations, leading to various interpretations. With these interpretations, the human intellect tries to classify and assess what it does not understand first.

But there is no answer. Modern Art does not provide answers, but questions.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres. "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers). 1991.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres lost his boyfriend of eight years (Ross Laycock) who died from AIDS-related illness and made this installation art"Untitled" (Perfect Lovers)the same year.

Two wall clocks that start off identical hung side-by-side and touched on a pale blue wall, gradually and finally, go out of sync.

His elegant expression of love and loss through two clocks is often read as a metaphor for the progress of the life of a couple and the consequences of time, which can introduce disharmony, illness, and the decay of perfection into that life.

"Time is something that scares me . . . Or used to. This piece I made with the two clocks was the scariest thing I have ever done. I wanted to face it. I wanted those two clocks right in front of me, ticking."

The two clocks are like most lovers who will go out of sync as two different existences. How deep we love each other that even a little disharmony hurts us so bad. But all the things, grand or tiny, will eventually wind down in this tranquil universe like these two clocks tick slowly and quietly along with the endless time.

When I look at the name "perfect lovers," I am wondering... Is it the imperfection between these two clocks makes them perfect?

3

I do know that they are the most frank expression of myself. ----Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo. Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair. 1940.

I met Frida Kahlo when I was experiencing a terrible time in my university life, and I was inevitably struck by her eventful life and her frankest attitude.

Frida Kahlo painted Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair in the wake of a particularly tumultuous time, just months after she divorced her famous husband, Mexican Muralist painter Diego Rivera.

He had always admired her long, dark hair, which she had cut off after their split. The braids were a central element in Kahlo's identity as the traditional La Mexicana, and in the act of cutting off her braids, she rejects her former identity. Unlike other previous self-portraits in which Frida always wear feminine dresses, She showed herself in an oversized charcoal gray suit resembling the ones that Rivera wore.

The act could be read not only as mourning, but as an act of self-assertion when Frida is eager to establish herself as an independent female artist.

I was happy for Frida's bigger accomplishment then. And I am even more exclamatory when seeing how we young girls' patterns of thought about love and life are still be controlled by some traditional social concepts. And I feel self-condemning for my once weak compromise.

I would like to quote a sentence from Friedrich Nietzsche to express the best way to love ourselves.

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. --- Friedrich Nietzsche