Hundreds Years' Walk, 2023, Photo Transfer, 76 x 56cm
How to break away from the ego's observations in the material world in order to see something behind it that is much bigger than verbal descriptions? Thereby building inner engineering to achieve abundance, joy, and peace. Faced with these research questions, I try to find answers in philosophy, science, literature, occultism, and printmaking experiments. The main areas I have explored and experimented with are the autotheory, Spirituality & Emptiness, and the Fluidity & Symmetry of the work. In this section I will briefly summarise the research on the main themes, extracting and reflecting on what drives my thinking and work creating.
Critical
Reflection
Since the Song Dynasty, there has been this proverb: The sea of bitterness has no bounds, turn your head to see the shore (which means that the earthly world is like the sea of bitterness, with no bounds, and that only through enlightenment can one achieve transcendence). In the face of this "sea of bitterness", which seems to be an inevitable path for human beings, I hope that, like Hesse's Siddhartha, I will not be confined to the so-called "teachings of the virtuous", but will understand and realising in my own life, which forms the theoretical basis of the unity of my present creation —autotheory.
Autotheory
BLUETS is a novel by author Maggie Nelson based on the autotheory, it is a "formal experiment" that contains an arrangement of 240 loosely-linked prose poems which Nelson refers to as “propositions”. My creative style is very much influenced by it, that the structure is built by pulling away from the core and by keeping attached to the core. In most of my compositions, the printmaking motif itself replaces the role of autobiography, which is a practice of detaching expression from text in my development based on autotheory.
Rather than documenting in prints the way out of pain, confusion, and obsession, I wish to present, as much as possible, those things that make me feel calm, joyful, and determined. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes it in The book The Visible and the Invisible : “Vision is not the metamorphosis of the things themselves in their vision, nor is it the double belonging of things to a large world and to a small private world, but it is a thought that rigorously deciphers the signs given in the body.” (Merleau-Ponty et al., 1992) There must be more behind what I see and capture that has not yet been identified and articulated, and a flash of insight at the moment may be the accumulation of all my experience and judgement or even the recognition of energy in the human genes accumulated by the ancestors. As with our innate ability to make associations, it protects us from seeing something suspected of being dangerous, so that we can associate it with a beast of prey and prepare to run away. Also like the Hundredth Monkey effect, (2023) which is an esoteric idea claiming that a new behavior or idea is spread rapidly by unexplained means from one group to all related groups once a critical number of members of one group exhibit the new behavior or acknowledge the new idea.
The autotheory as I understand it must not be limited to the healing of personal narratives or emotional catharsis (even though autobiography is one of the modalities of art therapy), but rather to the hope that these realisations can become the "hundredth monkey" or accelerate to a critical threshold of parameters that will awaken the sleeping parts of oneself and others. I've been thinking about this verb for the act of awareness, which is somewhere between "sleeping" and "active", less vague than "awakening" and more introspective than "releasing". In the end, I summed it up as the "dimension raising" of full consciousness like smooth breathing, and the "entropy reduction" of dissipating inertia like a condensation of water vapour. This is the closest description I can come up with, but I am also deeply aware of the limitations of language, which is perhaps why I need to detach myself from words and use visuals and images, as it is more important to perceive and understand with the eyes of the mind.
A similar concept is given in James Elkins's work Six Stories from the End of Representation：The images I am interested in show us things we can't possibly be see-ing: things so far away, so faint, so large or soft or bright that they couldn't possibly be contained in the rectangular frame of a picture and yet they are. These are pictures of objects that literally don't exist- that couldn't exist as they are pictured but somehow do...They seemed to have a common theme: they were images that did not simply depict objects, but demonstrated how some objects resist depiction. (Elkins, 2008)
In my research, I found that the artist Hodgkin and the French writer Marcel Proust inspired my theory on a methodological level. Hodgkin’s investigation is fundamentally autobiographical, a miniature diary that envisages the involvement of a self prepared to receive and incorporate images central to its own identity, images that are frequently part of his personal world. Hodgkin achieves all this without venturing too far into secret introspection but instead by putting experience in the service of the spectator, who feels liberated at last from any sort of inferiority complex with regard to a message that must be decoded. The artist’s self does not exclude but includes, and in this sense Hodgkin activates perception in terms described by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in order to indicate the reflexive act that allows the observer to become aware of his own sensations and overcome a state of inertia.
Marcel Proust, on the other hand, writes this in In Search of Lost Time: “Will that memory—the ancient moment that, due to the attraction of an identical moment, has come from a far off place to move me and incite recollections in my deepest self—will it ever plumb the very depths of my full consciousness?” (Proust et al., 2000) They both rely on and utilise involuntary memory, which is uniquely qualified to tap into events that are thought to be lost.
What if they are just not remembered for a while?
Spirituality & Emptiness
Souls are an expression of beauty, imagination and creativity. The ancient Egyptians said that to begin to understand the soul, one must listen to the heart. I think they were right. Standard. (Newton, 2010) Throughout the civilisations of the East and the West, from ancient times to the present day, whether in mythology, literature, art, science, occultism, philosophy or religion, there have been descriptions of a more spiritual, spiritual existence outside the material world, which may have different names and different terms, but which exists eternally and firmly. In my opinion, this existence is like the dark matter that occupies 95 percent of the universe, which cannot be observed but passes through our physical bodies all the time.
Pictures I took of the gallery space, 2023
Marina Abramović, Chair for Human Use with Chair for Spirit Use (6) , 2012, Wood, crisocola stone and quartz
“I am not particularly religious ... what I do believe in is spirituality. I believe that one of the components of a work of art should be spiritual!” Since the 1990s, Marina Abramović has increasingly turned to performances of longer duration. Through these, she has discovered a state beyond physical and mental exhaustion, and pain that she terms “luminosity”, which is perhaps comparable to the transcendence some people experience through meditation. Only reachable through intense focus, she has explained that “performance is about being in the present, it’s about creating a luminous state of being”.（2023）
When I visited Abramović's recent exhibitions at the RA, I sensed a clear periodisation. In the works of Abramović's later galleries, the frenetic energy of earlier performances has transformed into a compelling stillness that challenges the artist’s body in a different manner. Abramović has described the trajectory of her practice as “more and more of less and less”. This process of pushing the limits of the body and the mind, and then gradually moving towards peace and spirituality, is like a path to enlightenment, as the Tao Te Ching says: "Great Truth in Simple Words". A vivid example is Hesse's Siddhartha, a former Brahmin who went through physical and mental trials and tribulations in order to understand the Buddha's teachings. In the end, he became a boatman learnt the true meaning of life in the flowing water.
“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?" That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
For video artist Bill Viola, water is a powerful and recurring theme, and the artist traces this back to a formative incident in his childhood: “I was shown just by this accident (Drowning at age six), that there is more than just the surface of life. The real thing is under the surface. It’s a huge input of data. Biological, emotional, spiritual data…and the synapses in our brain are firing. There’s a gap between every single little neuron in our brain, there’s a gap of empty space, that’s really important. And the Buddhist masters have known this for a long time. Our Zen teacher in Japan, would always talk about emptiness and I didn’t understand really what he was saying…they’re talking about a real thing. A real thing that exists, that is the space between all the physical objects. And that’s where we exist, really. We don’t exist in the physical objects. But we really exist in between the empty spaces in reality.”（2019）
When it comes to emptiness in art, there is a Chinese word that combines “Kong "(emptiness)and "Ling “(spirituality), called "Kong Ling"(ethereal), which is used to describe poetry and paintings that have a far-reaching, ethereal and spiritual meaning. It is intuitively reflected in the white space of ink painting. The art of white space was consciously used and studied in depth during the Song Dynasty, a period when the art of white space in Chinese painting flourished. The Southern Song painters Muqi and Ma Yuan are among the representatives of this period. Most of them depicted still lifes and natural landscapes with simple ideas, replacing reality with emptiness, and using white as black. It is precisely this part of "empty" white space that can give people a respite from the material world and imaginative space for "spirit". I believe that the cultural prosperity and spiritual civilisation of an era will be reflected in artistic creations. The cultural prosperity of the Song Dynasty is also reflected in the minimalist aesthetics of "less is more”, which is one of the rules I remind me of from time to time during the creative process.
Ma Yuan, Banquet by Lantern Light, around 1198－1201, hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, 111.9 x 53.5 cm
Bill Viola, Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall), 2005
Muqi, Detail of Six Persimmons(left) and Chestnuts (right), 13th century, ink on paper, 36.2 cm x 38.1 cm
Fluidity & Symmetry
I wonder if symmetry is a symbol of life force and a biological quest? And in this seeming symmetry there exists at all times a random, ceaselessly changing fluidity. Vitruvius articulated that the proportions of man are common to all and have an inbuilt symmetry: for example, the length of the outspread arms is equal to the height of a man; the measurement from below the chin to the top of the head is one sixth of the height of a man; while the foot is one seventh the height of a man. The canvases that Wallinger had made are each his height in width and double that measurement in height. This reflection of the self in the material of the work responds to the recurring theme of identity throughout Wallinger’s practice as a whole.
To make the id paintings, Wallinger dispensed with brushes and instead painted directly with his hands, using only black paint, standing just inches from the canvas and working with both hands, on the left and right of the canvas simultaneously. The proximity of his body to the canvas and the reach of his hands resulted in paintings that have a natural symmetry. To reinforce this symmetry, at a midway point in the process determined by the artist, the canvas was flipped so that the lower half could be worked on. Each of the works in the series was made in one session of two to three hours, as it was important for Wallinger that wet paint should not be applied over dry, and that the initial, instinctive marks he made should not be overpainted or edited. The patterns that this process produced, and the fact that all of the works in the group were made using black acrylic paint, recall the form of the Rorschach ink blots used in psychoanalysis, something that is further reflected in the works’ titles.
Mark Wallinger, id Painting 29, 2015, Acrylic paint on canvas, 360 x 180 cm
Cornelia Parker, Poison and Antidote Drawing, 2010, Rattlesnake venom and black ink, Anti-venom and white ink, 37 x 37 cm(unframed) 46.7 x 46.7 cm (framed)
All Living Beings, 2023, ink on film paper, 58 x 65 cm
Cornelia Parker: If I could somehow plumb their depths, tap into their inner essence, I might find an unknown place, which by its very nature is abstract... both representational and abstract at the same time. (Tate) Parker consistently works with abstract forms, but she undermines the idea of the non-representational character of abstraction by instilling it with narrative content.
Poison and Antidote Tells the story of a battle between life and death, and provides a captivating background and counterpoint to the formal restraint of abstraction, connecting it to everyday life.
She elevates the plant-based or processed pigments we usually use in our work directly to animalistic chemical reactions in nature, that the pigments themselves are dangerous. Like a documentary photographer or war correspondent rushing to the front line, here the artist herself is a reporter travelling to the front line of the battlefield, bringing the process and traces of the war to us as they are. I am fascinated by these natural, living chemical changes, which appear stronger and heavier in the collision of black and white ink, which also inspires me in my choice of medium and colours.
A related example is the fact that I created the work All Living Beings, as a conscious struggle against the inertia of planned image-making. The original film paper records my traces of this: I broke this inertia with a fold of the film when I realised that I wanted to start conceiving figurative details, the uncertainty of the new pattern created by the fold allowed for a timely, subconscious reaction, and the easy-drying nature of the water-based ink compelled me to express this reaction immediately, thus capturing the "scene of the fight" as in Poison and Antidote on a hierarchical level. Even though the final image still has some seemingly figurative elements, it is not preconceived at all. This process of turning to abstraction is essentially a kind of training in thinking, and it is also the direction that I deliberately practiced in Unit 1, and I think it has made some breakthroughs in the process.
Through the study and research of unit 1, these seemingly different themes continue to overlap and intermingle within me. I can feel a 'unity' approaching me, which no longer be a deliberate pursuit of figurative elements, such the butterfly, which I have often used as another form of expression of my identity like Max Ernst's alter ego ‘Loplop’, but now I know that I must break through more completely, both externally and internally. ‘Great Truth in Simple Words’, like Anish Kapoor and Hiroshi Sugimoto's work, I would like to try to be more concise and touch that ‘unity’ in my next work. At the same time, I will explore the medium of photography, experiment with different sizes and proportions, and keep the ‘emptiness’ of the work while letting the ‘spirituality’ flow richly and abundantly through it.