Hair

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When I try to get close to nature I choose to use my body to sense it and contact it, hair is one of the ways I focus most on. In my research hair has been given many symbolic meanings since ancient times including

'power', 'soul' and 'memory'. I have experimented with using my hair to paint and with tying it to trees. I ended up making a brush out of the hair tied to the trees and used it to draw circles on the paper over and over again until the ink ran out. It was a circular process for me, as I used the brushes made from hair that symbolised "my soul" to draw the circles that symbolised the annual cycle of the trees, and my soul had unconsciously entered into this circular process, as if it were a natural law of life.

Soil

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The soil here is a mixture of soil and sand that I have collected from different countries and put together in a jar. It has long been a Chinese tradition that when a person travels far away, the elders of the family will ask him to bring the soil from his hometown with him.

When he arrives in a new place, putting the soil in his new home will help him adapt to the new environment more quickly, avoid illness and ensure good health.

This is in fact a kind of "Topophilia", a belief in nature and a prayer for its protection. When I mix the soil from different places and they blend with each other, it's like a new way of cycling nature. The process of the cycle is to blend, disperse and then blend again.

Circle

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In my research, the circle has always struck me as a strong symbol, perhaps because of the special symbolism that the symbol possesses. The circle has long represented an endless cycle in semiotics, and when I look at the annual rings of trees, I find that the circles are always rotating around the tree, like a long, endless cycle, giving me a glimpse of the cycle of nature. This symbol in my work not only represents the annual rings of the trees, but also the fact that once we enter the world we are actually in a cosmic cycle.