Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Painting
First Advisor
Meena Hasan
Second Advisor
Dana DeGiulio
Third Advisor
Yasi Alipour
Abstract
What does it mean to dream?
There is a passages from Daoist classic ‘Zhuangzi’, attributed to the philosopher Zhuang Zhou: The “Butterfly Dream”:
Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly, he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn't know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou
In this story, the dream becomes a state that destabilizes certainty. It opens a liminal zone where ambiguity and doubt are allowed to exist. The boundary between dream and reality, self and other, no longer remains fixed; the moment of transition becomes untraceable, and distinction itself begins to dissolve.
For me, the process of painting became a similar liminal space of dreaming, where forms could move between object, event, and feeling. My work draws from written language systems, patterns, everyday objects, symbols, and poetic phrases. Through drawing and sketching, these sources are transformed into abstract shapes, which I use as elements, and visual lexicons. In painting, they are reactivated through color, texture, and mark-making. In this space, an image does not need to settle into one meaning. It can hover, transform, and flirt with the boundary between what is seen, what is felt, and what is imagined.
This thesis does not shine a spotlight on my painting practice; instead, it creates the ambience and atmosphere where my painting came to exist. This is not a wide open entrance, it is a hidden path approximating to the works. If the painting is a place where forms dream, this thesis is a collection of fragments that get mixed into the dream. They carried forms from the past, from the personal, from the others, from the collective, from the non-humans, from things buried in the dirt, from things hovering in the air.
Recommended Citation
Liu, Siran, "Where Forms Dream" (2026). Masters Theses. 1602.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1602
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.