Shan Hai Jing · Classics of Mountains and Seas

One rain after another.

This rainy season, the sky is excreting

five years of constipation.

Yunnan.

Dry.

I fantasize about growing a pair of wet vulva,

forever clenched around a sun-before-sunrise

fire.

I always want to taste it at night.

You are my hallucinogenic mushroom,

the green-headed mushroom.

Climax.

The Way.

The road is all red-clay sauce.

Following westward through the forest, that is West Mountain.

To cry out.

To fold.

This time, I must wait until the eggs become fragrant.

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?