My creative practice has always revolved around one central question: how can emotion be expressed rather than merely represented?
When I first began learning painting, I used to believe that expression meant the visualisation of emotion. This assumption is still visible in my earlier works. Whether abstract or figurative, all of them were guided by emotional impulses. As works driven by expression, they varied in quality and form, yet they shared a common foundation: the act of expression itself is an outcome of subjective agency. It arises from the will to act, to transform inner experience into external form.
Under this awareness, the exploration of what drives such intentionality has become a recurring theme not only in my own practice but also across contemporary art discourse. Once I recognised this fixed pattern within my painting process, I began to consciously distance myself from the methodology of “reproducing” emotion. As the Chinese saying goes, “You are not the fish, how can you know its joy?” In representational art, the emotion conveyed by the finished work never fully matches the original impulse that initiated its creation. This is similar to Benjamin’s concept of aura that expressed the authenticity of an experience is lost through reproduction. In my own work, this realisation led me to pursue a different kind of expression: one that allows emotion to surge, intensify, and finally overflow at the moment of creation, rather than being carefully re-enacted.
To illustrate this simply: if my work begins with sadness, for now just let us assume the purest, most untainted form of sadness imaginable, unmixed with other emotions so I could clarify as easy as possible. If so, then this sadness, however genuine, will inevitably be reinterpreted through countless cycles of reflection, analysis, and decision-making. By the time it reaches the surface of the work, it will have already changed; it becomes a study about sadness, not sadness itself. Only when I allow emotion to build up to its very limit when it reaches a point of almost unbearable intensity. That is where expression become genuine. In that moment, expression overtakes representation. Philosopher Alan Tormey argues that the expressiveness of a work of art does not depend on the artist’s private feelings but on the publicly perceptible evidence within the work. It ‘s rhythm, pressure, proportion, and structure. This theory provided me with a new conceptual foundation. It encouraged me to think of emotion not as something to be transmitted, but as something to be constructed and perceived.
Earlier, the writings of Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Sigmund Freud’s essay on The Uncanny had already been quietly shaping my thoughts. Both thinkers address the tension between authenticity and repetition, familiarity and estrangement. All those ideas that pushed me to reconsider what “emotional expression” truly means. They helped me realise that art’s power may not lie in its ability to convey truth but in its ability to make the familiar strange again. At that time, I knew I wanted to enhance the emotional quality of my work, but I had not yet found a method to do so. The turning point came when I encountered the work of David Altmejd. He approaches sculpture as a living totality rather than a collection of fragments. By treating detail as part of a holistic system rather than as decorative excess, his works transcend the everyday object and achieve a sense of autonomy. This perspective inspired me to see my own works not as discrete expressions but as systems of energy and relation. An unexpected moment came when I was introduced to lampworking, a technique for shaping glass through flame. When I began working with glass, I realised that the nature of expression is not about representation but about the construction of relationships and processes. What I was really exploring was how to perceive those relationships with clarity. To me it;s much like the Taoist idea of “Xin Zhai” (the fasting of the mind) or Phenomenology’s concept of the “experience of self and other”, which both emphasise awareness free from external interference.
Unlike paint, glass resists control. It bends, cracks, and preserves the memory of heat and pressure. It “remembers” failure. Every overcorrection weakens it, making the next encounter with fire a potential breaking point. This unpredictability mirrors the structure of genuine emotion: complex, ambiguous, contradictory. Through these processes, I gradually came to understand that expression is not about emotional release but about structural organisation — about the way form, material, and perception interact to produce an experience.
In this sense, we ourselves become the medium of emotion, while the artwork becomes a site where emotion materialises through human agency.
My work Un-Rotted Bloom exemplifies this process. It explores how expression in art can surpass mere representation and become a negotiation between material agency, spatial condition, and psychological experience. The theories of Tormey (1971), Dewey (1934), Bachelard (1964), and Freud (1919) together form the intellectual framework of this work. Tormey teaches that expressiveness arises from perceivable form; Dewey reminds us that art is the organisation of experience; Bachelard sees space as the container of memory and emotion; and Freud reveals how the uncanny unsettles the boundary between the familiar and the repressed.
For me, Un-Rotted Bloom became an intersection of material, space, and psyche. A living negotiation between control and collapse, transparency and opacity. Its rhythm is built through this tension. When I exhibited the work at Safehouse1 in the summer in southeastern London, the space itself became an active participant. The venue, a decaying wooden house with cracked walls and creaking floors . Which seemed to breathe with the sculpture. This “vitality within decay” mirrored the “strength within fragility” of glass. As Rudolf Arnheim suggested, art’s complexity arises from the tension between order and disorder, both the house and the sculpture existed within this threshold. What might be called an aesthetics of entropy to some extent. From the artist’s perspective, I found in this exhibition an opportunity to explore how space itself could carry psychological and mnemonic weight. The meaning of the work emerged not from the object alone, but from the interaction between material, space, and perception.The audience’s reactions confirmed this. They described feeling both fascinated and uneasy. Precisely the ambivalence Freud identified in The Uncanny: when the familiar becomes strange and the subconscious resurfaces.
Through this exhibition, I came to understand that expression is a relational structure between material, space, and viewer. Cracks are not signs of failure, but records of resistance and survival.
From painting to glass, from pigment to fracture, my practice has shifted from the representation of emotion to the construction of experience. Un-Rotted Bloom is not merely a work of art. It is a system of thought, a space where fragility becomes knowledge, and expression becomes a way of understanding.
References
Tormey, A. (1971) The Concept of Expression: A Study in Philosophical Psychology and Aesthetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dewey, J. (1934) Art as Experience. New York: Perigee.
Arnheim, R. (1971) Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bachelard, G. (1964) The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.
Freud, S. (1919) The Uncanny. Standard Edition, Vol. XVII. London: Hogarth Press.
Husserl, E. (1913) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book. Translated by F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945) Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.
About the author
Xuya Wu graduated from MA Fine Art: Drawing at Camberwell College of Arts in 2025.