Where forms dream
Siran Liu
Rhode Island School of Design
What does it mean to dream? In Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, he dreams he is a butterfly. Upon waking, he asks: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that I am a man? In this story, dream becomes a state that destabilizes certainty. It opens a liminal zone where transformation happens; where ambiguity and doubt are allowed to exist. The moment of transition becomes untraceable, and distinction itself begins to dissolve. For me, painting occupies a similar space of suspension, where forms move between a thing, a happening, and a feeling. My work draws from patterns and symbols, written language systems, poetic phrases, and everyday objects. Through drawing and sketching, I turn these sources into abstract shapes, which I treat as a visual lexicon. In painting, they are reactivated through color, texture, and mark-making, transforming into hard-edge shapes, painterly marks, and calligraphic strokes that shift between object, event, and atmosphere. I am interested in how expression takes shape through the interaction of these visual elements: how they resonate with, emerge from, interrupt, and transform one another. If the painting is a place where forms dream, I let them transform into something unnamable: something that feels familiar, yet not fully identifiable. In this space, seeing is never fixed; it can hover between recognition, memory, and imagination.