Shan Hai Jing · Classics of Mountains and Seas

I say: who does not love the fox-spirit?

The white-faced gold-furred nine-tailed fox (hakumen kongō kyūbi no kitsune).

Five hundred years.

Grow one tail.

Born of the seal.

In the midst of doing evil.

The day of the seal.

The nine-tailed turns into Daji.

Seduced the king, destroyed Shang.

1 is yang-wood, 2 is yin-wood. 3 and 4 are fire: 3 is yang-fire, 4 is yin-fire. 5 and 6 are earth: 5 is yang-earth, 6 is yin-earth. 7 and 8 are metal: 7 is yang-metal, 8 is yin-metal. 9 and 10 are water: 9 is yang-water, 10 is yin-water.

Face like jade.

Body like gold.

Transformed into the nine-tailed.

Bao Si seduced once more.

King You of Zhou.

Perished.

Form is not different from form.

Emptiness does not shed form.

Eighty thousand elite troops,

chase and chase, kill and kill,

destroyed her —

and yet kept her.

It is said: “The number of heaven and earth begins at one and ends at nine.”

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?