Shan Hai Jing · Classics of Mountains and Seas

The ape's three cries — men's tears fall.

From Tangting Mountain, water-jade is born.

Shennong, the rain-master, Chisongzi.

All say they are kin.

Still, cook it.

Water-jade soaks the white ape.

The month of fasting.

Insects became human.

Each human is sorrow.

A hundred knots of grief cut through.

National Highway 308.

Wind around a mountain.

Pray for an immortal.

Or just —

Eat it.

Shan Hai Jing / Classics of Mountains and Seas: A Contemporary Monsterology.

June — December 2016, Kunming / Jingdezhen. During the Three Years Retreat, the artist took chapter-carving as ritual and the chisel as incantation, carving more than a hundred seals, rubbing them in cinnabar, and binding them into a thread-stitched album. The Dongba creation epic “Chongban Tu” — the name of the creator “Caogu Tiannenggu”, the flood motif, and the hermaphroditic cosmology — were, via Deleuze's “deterritorialization / reterritorialization”, transformed into the flowing space of “mountains-mountains-seas-seas”; the rupture of desire within abstinence and observance of precepts was, via Foucault's “technologies of the self”, forged into inscriptions of a subjective practice. It is the blade-carved variant of “Conceptual Landscape”, the rubbing-pre-history of “Mask Archaeology” (नकाब / Maska), and a Naxi artist's eternal interrogation: from where does humanity come, and toward where does it go?