Ma Liang awoke with a feeling of elation. 

His momentary happiness faded, however, when he realized that he had only been dreaming. 

He started to pick himself up off the ground when he became aware of a weight in his right hand.

Glancing down, he saw that his fingers were clutching a brush. 

“Perhaps I am not yet awake.” He shook his head and blinked his eyes. 

Neither are we. 

Ma Liang and His Magic Brush tells a story of a once poor boy, bestowed with a magic brush allowing him to turn his drawings into reality. He sets off helping the poor and the unfortunate. 

Healing Brush too wanders the edges of representation with this same weight. The artist is aware of her right hand; it is tangled with reality. Each thing she paints or captures becomes real, in one world of the other. Real enough, at least. 

Perceived objectiveness enabled by the uses of lens and the realism it achieves has been facing a turn, a walk back. As one then is subjected to too many truths, an abundance of imperfections comes to surface through a seemingly perfect apparatus. An omitting is necessary to sustain the self. The photographer here, like the painter, wields the brush to recover the ideal, creating an unintentional layer of new imagery.  This layer of mark-making surfaces the invisible artistic labour, a labour to make invisible what is deemed imperfect. A fulfillment of a consumer need of a particular “hyperreal” aesthetic standard.

The “Healing Brush”, as appeared in the exhibition title, is the name of a retouching tool from Photoshop utilized to make invisible, to conceal, and to recover the absolutes and the ideals from imperfections and blemishes. 

Healing Brush is a contemporary entry to photography and painting’s entanglement with representation. The series of works, ranging from photography, video animation, painting and photo-installation, circulates around Yi’s role as a commercial photographer in the industry, acting both as a spectator and fabricator to an aesthetic standard coming to form.

—Exhibition Text by Pongsakorn Yananissorn, 2019.

image still, Guiltless and Unintentional 爛漫豈無意, video animation, 19 minutes, 2019.