My father, Chang Qing 常青, couldn’t find his mic during a video call we had in 2012. So he wrote down what he wanted to say and held it towards the camera. He talked about the migration of culture: Buddhism traveled to China from the south, Marxism traveled to China from the west, and the methodology of drawing 素描 that both my father and me were trained with, the foundation of Revolutionary Realism, traveled to China from the Soviet Union. I was traveling as well, and reexamining my cultural heritage with the newly obtained critical distance. My father tried to ease my anxiety by saying “Let go” in the end. I took screenshots of this conversation and later made them into a book, accompanied by my memory of 10 drawing principles my father taught me, and drawings informed by those principles.

Drawing Book, edition of 3, 6 x 6 x 6 in. (2012)