Faculty of Art

Drawing and Painting

Xijia (Romee) Lai

The Song of the Vineyard

I will sing for the one I love a song about his vineyard: My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit. “Now you dwellers in Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more could have been done for my vineyard than I have done for it? When I looked for good grapes, why did it yield only bad? Now I will tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard: I will take away its hedge, and it will be destroyed; I will break down its wall, and it will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland, neither pruned nor cultivated, and briers and thorns will grow there. I will command the clouds not to rain on it.” The vineyard of the LORD Almighty is the nation of Israel, and the people of Judah are the vines he delighted in. And he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness, but heard cries of distress. (Isaiah 5:1-7 NIV)

“Song of the VineyardThis work is informed by the passage in Isaiah 5, often referred to as the “Song of the Vineyard,” where a carefully cultivated vineyard yields not good fruit, but wild grapes. The painting presents a luminous and abundant landscape—visually rich, inviting, and seemingly full of life—yet marked by a quiet dissonance.Within the scene, a recurring visual element appears in the form of a lotus motif, derived from a personal tattoo. While the lotus is often associated with purity or renewal, here it functions differently. It points to an attempt to cover over a wound—to transform something unresolved into something aesthetically contained. In this sense, the image carries both concealment and memory.The vineyard itself reflects a condition of care and intention. It is not neglected; it has been formed, tended, and sustained. Yet despite this, what emerges is misaligned with what was intended. The presence of “wild grapes” is not immediately visible as failure, but unfolds as a deeper recognition: that what appears whole and even beautiful can still bear the mark of distortion.This work engages a personal history of moving through a period of inner disorientation—one that, at the time, was not fully recognized as such. What seemed like self-definition and control gradually revealed itself as a descent into fragmentation. The result was not the absence of growth, but the production of something other than what gives life.Through this painting, I reflect on the complexity of formation: how care can coexist with brokenness, and how misalignment can remain hidden within beauty. The vineyard becomes a space not only of cultivation, but of revelation—a place where the nature of what is produced is eventually made known.”