Shan Hai Jing · Classics of Mountains and Seas

Who chose whom?

Did the night choose me,

or did I choose the night?

When the dark came, they laughed at me together with joy;

they said they were going to bend me;

I took up their fruit-knife,

and in public cut off half a yellow banana —

the severed banana.

Coming down the mountain she asked me why I would not make love with her;

entering the city she asked me whether I was a homosexual;

tonight we became one another's homosexuals;

we called this “love”.

I became a “homosexual”

… because “I” made myself unable to make love with the opposite sex;

at Old Na's dining table I cut off, with my own hand, a “yellow banana”.

Who chose whom?

Did the night choose me,

or did I choose the night?

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?