In I Talk to the Wind, the artist uses “wind” as an invisible yet omnipresent medium to point toward the ghostly persistence of patriarchal power in a state of collapse. The work stages a confrontation between an aging “father-god” and a young male figure filled with vitality: the former hollowed out by history and authority, the latter shaped as the sacrifice through which patriarchy continues itself. Power here is no longer merely a tool of domination, but a mechanism that survives through its own repetition and loss.
The wind functions both as a carrier of memory and as a metaphor for historical motion. It blows past myths of the past into the present, binding individuals to cycles of inheritance and replacement. Through a restrained yet tense visual structure, the work condenses this invisible historical logic into a relationship of gazes, where the viewer confronts the fading father figure while recognizing their own position inside the same system.

Stephen Yao (b. 1995, graduated from the University of Southern California with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting, currently working and residing in North America) explores the predicament of individual existence within the overlapping contexts of East Asian society and post-historical discourse through his painting practice. This examination traverses the realms of history and nature, politics and faith, and paternal and maternal lineages. Influenced by German Romanticism and post-war European painting traditions, his works explore the individual's spiritual agitation in opposition to the sublime within this era of uncertainty.