Shan Hai Jing · Classics of Mountains and Seas

Refusal.

She does not like to be refused.

Noon, burning sun.

Earth-red iron gate, boiling-pot soup.

Plastic toy-cart wheels.

Evil 🔥 on the rack.

What is being knocked is not the door —

it is the fire of desire.

A bag.

Dinner.

A book.

A flesh-coloured women's Mao suit.

Stepping

on a potato,

flying against the wind.

Emerald maize thickets.

Bleeding red earth.

Red, green, gold, yellow.

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?