Sarah Cooper
返璞歸真 “Back to what is plain and true”
Sarah Cooper is a comedian and writer. She wrote 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings, How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings and the memoir Foolish, and reached an enormous audience in 2020 with deadpan lip-sync videos.
Fei interviewed her for Feisworld.
The comic whose best-known work is a face doing the talking, painted as a face doing the talking — with no color and no props.
Xiang Li on the title
返璞歸真 — to go back to the uncarved block, back to what is genuine. It is a Daoist phrase about stripping the ornament off a thing until what is left is true.
Go and find them
This page is about the painting. Their own work is better.
What is in this painting
Xiang Li builds a portrait out of creatures. Each one is a claim about the person sitting among them.
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1 The title
Top left: back to what is plain and true.
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2 The rings
Three concentric circles behind her head — a halo drawn as a single unclosed line rather than filled in with gold.
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3 The hand at her chin
Loosely closed, held up. It is the gesture immediately before somebody says something.
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4 The look
Eyes to one side, mouth almost closed. Xiang paints the timing rather than the joke.
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5 The pale jacket
Left as bare silk. Almost half the painting is unpainted ground.
