Painting Fang Bin Bin's portrait has nothing to do with the famous Chinese actress, or with any connection I may have with her for that matter, but rather with how she was depicted as the protagonist in a piece of writing, "Balada a Fang Bin Bin", a surreal and enigmatic poem I stumbled with on the internet. In this piece of writing, she is presented as the woman everyone desires, but she couldn't care less about it. She has a single obsession, an infatuation, a desire she wouldn't be able to get to: the dead writer of the poem. She referred to her social media followers as shitty friends and to the coffee grounds in the bottom of the cup as revelatory of her own fate.

The version of this poem I had access to, and that captivated me since the very first reading for reasons I cannot fully comprehend, was illustrated with a black and white photo, which is the one that I later used as a reference for this painting.