Summary | The Essential Early Stages Every Artist Must Go Through
🔖 Premise: Choosing an art career must come from personal will—not from family pressure or external expectations.
1️⃣ Technical Learning Phase
Whether you pursue contemporary art or traditional/academic approaches, you must develop a deep understanding of the materials and techniques you use. Only then can you create freely without being limited by technical constraints.
2️⃣ Knowledge-Building Phase
Read widely—philosophy, art history, critical theory, plus films, documentaries, literature, and beyond.
This builds the theoretical foundation for your creative freedom.
In many ways, it also shapes the trajectory of your artistic voice.
3️⃣ Self-Excavation Phase
From my observation, only a very small group of artists grew up without suppression from their family environments—those who had a healthy psychological path and simply kept drawing since childhood.
Most artists experienced some form of psychological struggle early in life.
A psychology book I once read said that many children show deep enthusiasm for art because their parents failed to maintain emotional connection with them—compelling them to express through art instead.
This phase requires the artist to dismantle inherited mental constraints and understand who they truly are.
Only when you know yourself at that depth will your work stop looking like someone else’s.
4️⃣ Not Getting Lost in Trends or Ideologies
Political hot topics, identity discourses, resistance movements—they all deserve attention and reflection.
But strictly speaking, they are not your core as an artist.
They are not your lifelong question.
They are not the deepest essential core of your work.
There are more profound, universal questions beneath all of these.
5️⃣ Finding the Themes You’re Genuinely Interested in for Life
Congratulations—you’ve reached Professional Artist Level 01.
At this stage, making work you love becomes exhilarating.
Each project fuels you with endless energy.
Looking back at your works, discussing ideas with peers—you’ll feel constant joy and discovery.
This is one of the happiest states a human being can experience.
So keep going. Do it for a lifetime.
⚠️ These phases don’t follow a fixed order, but ideally you go through all of them.
Being an artist means living in a cycle of pain and joy.
It’s a long-term process of competing with yourself, transcending yourself.
Art forces you to grow and to face life’s hardest questions with honesty.
Humans are greedy—during the toughest times, art is often the only companion.
But once art helps you survive, you start craving success and wealth from it, becoming anxious and burdened by it.
If art is truly your lifelong love, external achievement doesn’t matter as much as people think.
Success is merely a worldly label.
And if you genuinely are one of the “chosen ones,” the universe has already reserved a seat for you—quietly, patiently.
So stop overthinking. Just do the work.
