Dec 15, 2012 I turned on the computer to read the breaking news that a 24 years old man killed 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The gunman in the Connecticut shooting blasted his way into the elementary school and then sprayed the children with bullets, first from a distance and then at close range, hitting some of them as many as 11 times. Suddenly I was tearful.

For a while since then, I could not bring myself to do art related work. A few weeks later, I decided to devote s series of art work to tell the stories of those victimized children and their parents. I name the series of three pieces "Last Kiss I, II, III". On my mind a family scene repeats again and again. In the morning a daddy raises his sweetheart daughter to kiss her cheek and says goodbye before she goes to school. A mommy prepares the lunch box and kisses the forehead of her lovely son to wish him a good day. A brother holds the hand of his little sister to go to school together. Those are the scenes happen everyday in many families. Who can imagine those would be the last kisses for those families who fall victims of the senseless crime? In my works tree branches stretch all over the bodies of the mother, farther and their children to describe the blood bound nature between them. I also use different languages (English, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Arabic, German, Korean, French, German, etc.) to repeat the same message "Our hearts are broken today". There is one thing in the world that has no barrier of culture, language, country and religion. That is love.

I wish my current works can help lead to a wave of reaction toward school children protection, gun control, a weapon legislation in U.S.