Fountain

"This was a work I absolutely had to create." 

At the end of 2014, I reached a pivotal turning point in my life—I became a mother. My body underwent miraculous changes, beginning to produce a ceaseless flow of breast milk. Throughout the ensuing lactation period, mastitis struck frequently, and the clogged milk ducts brought me high fevers and unbearable pain, etching memories of agony into my flesh. To relieve the suffering, I had to express the stagnant milk trapped inside my body. Outside my body, I re-encountered the very substance that had once been lodged within me, causing such torment. Though it brought me pain, it also nourished my child, supplying life-sustaining energy—breast milk became a wondrous substance I both loved and resented. Thus, in the midst of battling this pain, I acutely sensed that my body at that moment was brimming with boundless life force and explosive power. For the first time, I marveled at the sheer intensity of energy and dynamism my body harbored.  

When I lay on my back and squeezed those two overfilled "water balloons," scorching milk, under tremendous pressure, erupted from the volcanic craters of my body. Like a millennia-sealed spring suddenly unleashed, it shot jubilantly into the air, forming several gleaming arcs that soared over 2.5 meters high before transforming into a cascade of icy white arrows. They rained down at free-fall speed, striking my chest and splashing into my eyes. I couldn’t open them—tears mingled with milk as they spilled out. And I knew it was a liquid fusion of pain and overwhelming emotion, because in that instant, I realized the "Fountain" had emerged naturally from my body. Through the misty, milky haze, I saw my body gradually morphing into a monument of a fountain, one imbued with masculine vitality. My body was a vessel of life and creativity, while the pure white milk carved into it the memories of love and anguish. I understood then that this spectacular phenomenon of the human body was more real than any fountain I’d seen in European plazas—it was the most primal, virile fountain of life, surging from within a woman’s body. I became enthralled by this miraculous body and felt an urgent desire to transform and express this sensation. I knew that heaven, even as it delivered this pain, had also handed me a gift. A great work was taking shape in my mind, one I was compelled to create—and so Fountain was born.  

Choosing the compositional angle was paramount. Should the milk spray upward, downward, or straight ahead? When my supine body became both pool and altar, and the milk shot vertically into the sky, the tension of the body was perfectly captured—a breathing, aching monument of a fountain emerged. Under Caravaggio-esque chiaroscuro, the grainy details blurred, leaving the white milk starkly visible. The specifics of the two breasts faded away, replaced by a breathtaking landscape in the frame: two towering active volcanoes spewing milky-white lava.  

For this work, Fountain is a name that transcends perfection—it is minimalist yet potent, a tribute to maternal love, a celebration of life, a testament to the body’s immense creative power, and an ode to human creativity. It also rekindles a dialogue with art history—from Fountain to Fountain: French Neoclassicist Ingres“The Source”(1856), which planted the seed of orthodoxy in public consciousness, to Dadaist Duchamp’s rebellious urinal Fountain (1917), to Bruce Nauman’s Self-Portrait as a Fountain(1966). This 160-year river of art history finally welcomed, in 2015, a radical new interpretation by a female artist. Fountain(2015) is no longer just my personal narrative—it belongs to all who have ever nurtured life, a shared tsunami and epic of existence. Reimagined through a contemporary, new-media, female lens, this leap forward exhilarated me beyond measure.  

Returning to Fountain on the screen, the 11-minute piece gradually draws to a close. The once-full breasts now run dry, the faint blue veins beneath the skin like exposed roots in parched earth. Beyond the beauty and pain of the imagery lingers a sorrow for life itself. Yet those radiant arcs that once glittered in the air never truly vanish—they have already seeped into the pupils of every viewer, rising like a tide in their minds.