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To me, the pursuits of Chinese ink painting and psychotherapy are both healings to the multi-generational displacement that many of the Chinese diaspora have experienced since the last century. My story began with my father relocating alone as a teenager to Taipei during China's liberation war in 1949 and leaving behind his parents in Beijing. The displacement continued as my generation of the Chinese diaspora then disseminated to the West, in my case, emigrating to Australia in my teens with my family.
The practice of cultural activities has been what sustained the link to our origin. My earliest memory of this was of my father, who became a Chinese historian, bringing me to Peking Opera in Taipei as a child. Against the backdrop of glittering costumes, the familiar operatic songs, and erhu accompaniment, he whispered to me stories of heroes and villains, and there I shared his yearning for his homeland barricaded by political divide. Then through our mutual love of Chinese art and history, he sowed in me the seeds of reconnection.
Psychotherapy to me is also an art that responds to one's yearning to rekindle what is disrupted. As therapist, and companion, helping patients integrate their history and emotional narratives, I find in the process my own journey to a greater connectedness. Over the years, the learning in psychotherapy deepened my understanding of Chinese painting, and the Chinese paintings to me often became visual illustrations of psychotherapeutic thought. This is particularly so with the expressive xieyi (写意), or writing-mind genre of Chinese classical painting, forged by artists who lived through great social upheavals, or grew up in the generation that followed. Their creative endeavour became the healing for their displacement and loss, and prominent examples were Dong Yuan, Jing Hao at the end of the five-dynasties, the Southern Song masters, Bada Shanren and Shitao at the end of Ming dynasty, Xu Bei Hong and his generation of masters that emerged