Shan Hai Jing · Classics of Mountains and Seas

Three heads, six eyes.

Six legs, three wings.

Vast supernatural powers.

Xianxiu (hie fu).

He said: I will cause a flood to pour upon the earth and destroy all under heaven; every living thing on earth that has flesh, blood, or breath shall die. But I will make a covenant with you: you and your wife, your sons, your sons' wives shall enter the ark. Of every clean animal take seven male and seven female; of unclean animals one male and one female; and of the birds of the sky seven male and seven female. These shall be preserved for seed, to multiply on earth.'

He said: “Leave your country, your people, your father's house, and go to the land I will show you.”

He said: in the Garden there are rivers of water that do not stagnate; rivers of milk whose taste does not change; rivers of wine pleasing to the drinker; rivers of honey, pure in substance; and all kinds of fruit to enjoy; “many gardens and vines, and maidens with round breasts and of equal age, and full cups of sweet water; there one hears neither evil speech nor lies.”

He said: “Dharmas arising from causes and conditions — I say these are empty, are also called the provisional, and are also the meaning of the middle way.” And again: “There is no dharma that does not arise from causes and conditions; therefore, of all dharmas, there is none that is not empty.”

Seven up, eight down (anxious unrest).

Furious winds, great waves.

Three-threes, nine-nines.

Impotence, premature ejaculation.

On the road, an encounter with Li Shizhen.

A Chinese-medicine shop.

Queue up.

Register.

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?