Intimate, personal, and honest— “Fly or Fall, Quiet My Soul” is an inward reflection on coping, healing, and transformation.

 

Bearing her trademark half naked, interpretative self-portraits, her oil paintings tell a familiar but also deeply personal narrative of contrasts: Finding pain and solitude in aloneness, desolation and beauty in darkness, and the delicate yet strong resolve of a woman coming to terms with her own metamorphosis at a time of collective and personal crisis. She narrates the range of her experiences by depicting herself as a winged creature in different spaces and phases of healing and transformation. The wings, noticeably fashioned after that of a dragonfly’s, draw inspiration from the insect’s remarkable traits and life cycle: how they remain as nymphs in the water for years before transforming into their adult form, their impeccable hunting skills which allow them to predict their prey’s location and maintain their target in the same spot, and how their wings can independently control each wing to propel in six different directions. It also reminds the artist of her childhood days, which are heavily laced with idyllic memories of catching dragonflies in the province where she grew up in.

 

“Fly or Fall, Quiet My Soul” shows the messy, unpredictable, and chaotic survival mechanisms of an individual’s day-to-day existence in unusual times. Like a dragonfly, Ping nurtures her adaptability and readiness to face whatever circumstances are thrown her way. While always not with utmost ease, but nonetheless—as the show’s title succinctly puts it—also about being here, still, where aspirations still burn bright amidst a time when everything seems hellbent on snuffing out that inner light.