In Gefei Qi, the artist reworks Wagner’s heroic figure into the image of a contemporary schoolboy. In the original myth, Siegfried is a young man cursed by his noble bloodline, unknowingly trapped within an ancient heroic narrative that ultimately leads to his destruction by idealism itself. By giving this name to a child placed beneath symbols of the rising red sun, the work draws a fragile connection between individual life and collective ideology.
The figure links personal growth to the repetition of history: 1911, 1939, 1966, and a projected 2028 suggest different generations facing similar structural pressures. The child’s body becomes a site where history and ideology quietly converge—he does not yet fully grasp their meaning, yet he is already shaped by them. The work leaves this condition unresolved, hovering between the possibility of losing oneself in freedom, being broken by ideals, or surviving within reality.

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.