Wasted (Left) Regret (Middle) Helping (Right)
Oil on canvas 84.1 x 118.9 cm 2019
I am Pang Li Hao, an artist who writes, draws, paints or even sticking pictures into my sketchbook as a habit. This habit can be recognise as a diary, but to me it was like a game. I don’t just record of what happen during the day, I record anything that I saw, hear, and feel. It was like collecting fragments of myself and my surrounding.
These fragments that I have jotted down in my sketchbook became a subject for me to recapture and redesigning it on the canvas. As I look back again of what I have put together, it gave me the sense of how my life was and who I was during that period of time.
As for my painting of the dead animals, I love to take picture of them and most were squash by vehicle. I didn’t felt sad for them instead I was curious and filled with excitement. The more photos I take, the more it connects me towards the feeling of suicide. During that time, I felt like getting knocked and kill by a vehicle. It was due to the depression I felt and the lack of communication. Eventually, I manage to discuss these issues with my parent and now it became a reminder to me that life is indeed precious.
As for the final set of painting, it was mainly about regret, care, help, and having a strong will. To start off, I was a person who is lazy and had no motivation throughout this four years of my studies. Then at one night, I had an argument with my mother. Hearing the word “what troubling you” from her made me lose myself and realising that all I did was nothing. After realising the mistakes, she helped me up again, the feeling of a mother’s love and care brought me back to what I was doing, ART. Not only has my mother helped me to realize but also my younger brother. It was a shining morning, I woke up, took a bath, look through my phone and went back to sleep. My brother was there, pulling my hand and getting me up to finish my painting. In that moment his attitudes moved me, in the past he was a lazy person who was the same as me which plays a lot of video games, waking up late and missing out classes. But now he is reading books, achieving A on his exam and studying occasionally. That kind of attitudes influenced me, make me became a better person like him.
To conclude, painting is a way to express the feelings inside of me that is hard to convey to others, which is a healing tool to heal myself mentally and physically. Each painting has led me to a better start in finding out who I am and where I want to be in the future.
