YOURONG JIN ’21

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This piece was created April 2020, after Colgate switched to remote mode. I was staying on campus and had been trying to go home to Nanjing, China. However, due to travel restrictions during the pandemic, international flights between the U.S. and China kept being cancelled. I had booked a total number of 7 sets of airline tickets but none of them survived the cancellations. The subject of the painting is me. I am holding a Canada goose in my hands, symbolizing the village of Hamilton. My body is ripped open on the side and flowers grow out of me. The flowers are called “Yingchun Hua”, and they are flowers that remind me of spring in my hometown. Pieces of my body are ripped and scattered into the air. The background of the work is consisted of a modified photograph of the inside of a plane. The photograph was taken by a friend of mine who successfully got on this particular flight and went back to China. This flight was the only flight of the airline that survived policy restrictions and flew once every week.