Reflection
1. The First Person
I always try to use my first impression to express objective forms subjectively. Here “I” am just a chronicler, without judgment or consideration. The process of aesthetic judgment and analysis is replaced by my feelings while I am in the moment, and it is that moment’s joy that produces my urge to chronicle. “I” wander down the path, not “I” travel the path to some other place. I chronicle, I assert. At this moment there is no observer’s cold gaze. Observation is just a flickering of recollection within the heart, but not a continuous stream of thought, whether it’s a tree or Morandi’s bottle… forms from the chaos of memory and things just becoming memory are frozen in a moment of time, and any ideas of significance or value are banished to the limitless expanse of objective declarations. “I” in the first person, “He” in the third. Explorers gone astray, people losing themselves along the road of reading, thinking, conveyance of meaning, are summoned to a peaceful place where meaning no longer has effect, and even the sexiest quality in art creation--exploring spirit-- has no significance. Who can “I” be? Where can I go? All the questions must be suspended, put nearby but in a place never to be touched. “Where am I?” At least, where am I at this moment? All answers are useless, all searches futile, the only thing that can prove “I am here”– I am returning inwards along the road of reading, thinking, expressing.
This is what “I” know, the significance of the first person.
2. The Campus
For a person who enjoys wandering alone, a campus at night is a very good place to go. I’m lucky in that I’ve always had a campus that I could wander in at night--near my home was a very expansive university campus. They were too lazy to build a continuous wall around it, and there was no gate to lock at night, so it was open like a large swath of forest. When I was young I would go with Zhutou and just wander around, and when I got older I liked going by myself. If I was tired, if it wasn’t too cold, I could just find a place to lie down and sleep until I was woken by a jogger and then I would go home (our home was very peaceful; my wanderings were not because I was afraid to go home). Particularly during holidays, the desolateness on the campus was frightening. I thought I could streak naked and not be embarrassed (but I only thought about it); in short, I could have done anything I wanted, no matter how shameful. Looking back, what I thought about most wasn’t the beauty of the night, but to steal things—whatever it was, even if it was just half a brick that I threw away somewhere else, it would be exciting (but I never did it). Zhutou did it, stole a big pile of books from the library, and then didn’t know what to do. He came to find me, and we brought the books to the river and threw them in. They were all books we couldn’t understand. He only did it this once and that dispelled all thoughts of stealing.
But the night doesn’t produce many stories, and I’m not a person who likes collecting stories, anyway. Poets savor the lingering taste of the pitch-black night, but I was just a kid back then-- I didn’t even know that behavior was called wandering. Into high school and university, this kind of aimless wandering became a habit; I always went out at night by myself. Usually I just stayed on the campus, and during holidays I went to the campus near my house. That later wandering had a hint of nostalgia (what kind of memories can you find of aimless night wandering?). If we say night wandering is just a collecting of memories, and all you can collect is memory caves, at the same time producing new memory caves that need to be found next time, voids overlaid upon voids until it’s a thick pile of memory caves without any awareness of the night (except that night can be cold, everybody knows that), then it just makes you a consummate night wanderer, or we can say, you have become night itself.
For an idle night wanderer, the hollow dark is more brilliant than the daytime--it’s just that the colors illuminated under the sun don’t emerge. I’m not entirely clear where those night colors come from, exactly, but I do know that my eyes have yet to see them. I’m still using the paints on my palette to express those unpredictable colors, but no matter whether it’s oil or acrylic, canvas or paper, they don’t reveal themselves to me. Perhaps they are only fabrications from a fantasyland. Only in spreading colors on the canvas can I embark on that imaginative mental journey.
Or maybe it’s because it’s too dark! I always hope to see some light emerge from the night, so I invent some bright rays, lights that emerge suddenly, and in a moment disappear without a trace. Like a dream, they leave only the memory of a sparkling light, impossible to dispel. Surrounded by darkness, this light seems a profound mystery, for it’s impossible to know what it implies, and it’s only in the recollection behind my eyes that I experience an intense desire to express it.
In reality, I gave up long ago any rational judgment or analysis of sketching’s targets. There are a few forms that I’ve always been very familiar with; as soon as I close my eyes they appear, like nightmares I can’t drive away, I can only put them down on paper. There are also some random dream images, and in the moment they appear I want to capture that moment, have to capture it. As for the result, what the slowly hatched and suddenly glimpsed image produces is the same; after all, I’m just a simple person. How do I say this? I can compare it to black: black is not specific to or only a characteristic of night. I choose black mostly because it points towards my inner simplicity--I’ve never thought that this choice manifests as a choice between night and day.
3. A hidden ‘x’ means “I only agree to live simply”. The hardest part of this sentence to understand is ‘simply’: almost nobody can do it (at least nobody who says it has done it). Simplicity is not merely simplifying things; if you pair this word up with other words, it can become extremely complicated and hard to predict. For me, changing things we perceive into ideas we can explain is an endless process. The perceived world is a real system that is too big to articulate, to sketch, to record… every ounce of our ability to manipulate becomes powerless, pathetic. What can I say? What is there to say? If I have to say something, and am permitted to consider all I see and hear as an objective reference system, then I can only talk about my tiny ignorance in front of this perfect system (it’s also possible it’s an arrogance hiding deep in a place that hasn’t yet been opened). In practice, I narrate, I sketch, I write; on paper, on canvas, until all the conveyable truth is only the unconscious vestiges left of an arrested mental journey. Nothing is actually expressed, and there’s no enjoyment or unburdening in this process. All of the truth has been concealed by the layered colors--even the symmetrical ‘x’ to mark the direction and location is now irrelevant--and the proof of my awkwardness and stiffness is doomed to be buried in a pile of fantasy forms. The first ‘x’ can be called a mark because of its specific function (except that here it is a metaphor for an unformed thought); then the second, the third…layer upon layer the paper becomes a web of dense markings, until it becomes a subconscious action. Now the ‘x’ appears more like a kind of simple imprint rather than a mark, and its function has been replaced by an x-shaped symbol; on and on until it is replaced by a new symbol that flickers from the mind. What is worth remembering should be recorded, regardless of whether it is concealed in the end.
When I choose paper as a medium, it is not a random choice--it most likely comes from an individual tendency towards writing. I’ve tried painting on canvas and many other mediums, but in the end I always decide to paint on paper, the brush’s blots on the paper like the ink blots after writing, very unlike the forms left after applying paint to a canvas. Marking the paper again and again is more interesting to me than applying paint, using one spontaneous symbol all over the page--I repeat the symbols hundreds of times, and never tire of it. I’ve never thought about what the end result will be, am not willing to speculate. Once the significance of these symbols reaches its limit, the paper is left with a tranquility that emerges after feverish activity. This is the final tranquil mood (friends say my paintings are very tranquil; though this is not necessarily my intention, I really like the abstract meaning of this word ‘tranquil’). I always want to use this word ‘tranquil’ to make a good sentence, but I can never come up with one better than the painting, which might imply I don’t actually understand this word, but if that was really true, the final marks would just be an exhaustion after an outbreak of a manic hysteria. But this is not the significance or the result, not a monologue of exhibitionism, just questioning, only questioning.
