between the water's edge and the setting sun. Their faces and bodies overlap within layers of watercolour washes, their boundaries continually blurred, rendering individual identities suspended and unstable. The pervasive light and misty layers of colour within the composition suggest these figures exist simultaneously in the present and in fading memory, creating a visual field suspended between recollection and oblivion.
Employing “amnesia” as a structural metaphor, the work points to fractures within collective experience concerning history, emotion, and self-awareness. Though the figures collectively face the same landscape, they lack clear communication or direction, as if swept into a perpetual yet indescribable drift. Through this collective blurring and overlapping, Amnesia II reveals the fragile state of contemporary individuals within a context where identity, memory, and belonging are constantly being reconfigured.

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.