Chapter 5. New Olymipa
While Manet’s Olympia is centered on the gaze from the outside world, New Olympia turns that gaze inward.
This work is about confronting vulnerability, self-doubt, and the quiet tension between confidence and fragility — a reflection and meditation on the ongoing search for my true self.
Body as canvas
Your coldness is like thousands years of the glacier
On top of the Kilimanjaro,
Passing through my bare skin,
And lighting up all the blooming wildflowers on it
Now they are burning,
burning so wildly,
Leaving all these beautiful scars
on the canvas of my body.
Day
dreaming
This war is endless.
I am exhausted
from the endless cycle
of destruction and reconstruction.
I need a pause —
in the shifting space
between light and shadow,
where I don’t have to choose
between sun and darkness.
Just daydreaming,
eternally.
Another Realm
蝉噪林逾静，
鸟鸣山更幽。
The louder the cicadas sing, the stiller the forest becomes; the clearer the birds’ song, the deeper the mountain’s serenity.
There is another realm,
between where light meets shadow,
where reflection touches reality,
where the moon greets the sun.
It is my own safe place —
where I need no nourishment from society to grow,
no applause to feel proud,
no witness to exist.
It is the land where I plant new dreams,
my quiet garden of becoming.
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
