Eternally Unfinished(🇬🇧)

Watercolor drawing from 1984 by Lise-Lotte (Mother)

I was five years old on a warm summer day in northern Sweden. After hiking in the forest for several hours with my family, I lay down among the blueberry bushes. Lying on the ground, surrounded by the beautiful northern Swedish forest, I closed my eyes and fell asleep. My mother seized the moment to bring out her watercolors and paint me. She worked quickly, aware that I could wake up at any moment. Sure enough, halfway through, I woke up, and she put down her brushes. The drawing has remained unfinished ever since.

Today, this incomplete drawing hangs in a central place in my home here in Beijing. Every time I look at it, I am filled with a warm feeling—a memory of a bygone childhood. My closed eyes are like a portal to a timeless dimension in the world of dreams, and the white emptiness of the paper leaves room for imagination and reflection.

I want, in some way, to capture these encounters between being and not being, between movement and stillness, between the visible and the invisible. It is in these moments that I find inspiration and meaning.

It is in that in-between space that I try to capture the essence of the human condition. The empty area in my mother's painting is a reminder that every work, every person, is an ongoing project—always developing, always in motion. It is the incomplete that makes us whole.