Shan Hai Jing · Classics of Mountains and Seas

Broken eggs, broken rivers and mountains.

The great river does not return.

Mischievous waves.

Human dalliance.

A crime of the ages.

West of the old ramparts, it is said the head of Hu Ben Lu (Hu Benlu) rears high.

Jagged rocks pierce the sky, terrifying waves sweat, four legs drunk on the wave-shore.

Rivers and mountains like a painting, summer hibernation winter's busy work.

Broken eggs, broken rivers and mountains.

Da Vinci's egg.

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?