Shan Hai Jing · Classics of Mountains and Seas

“Second Classic of the South”.

Dry-land boat-rowing, blueberries seized.

Dazzling younger brother and unceasing lechery, harming his elder brother.

Said: Wenlin, Tianjun Hall, Lan Bai Hong, Yu Jian, the newly-built cinema.

Tianxiang Bookstore, Salvador, there is a bakery…

The street office had a meeting yesterday, busy with tea.

Big sister in snakeskin high heels bound with leather cord, on her small waist a flesh-white silk net.

Big brother Da, cloud-sister, mountain-cloud-petal holding the western meal.

Osman, Arab little sister, the index-finger-zither transmitting sound.

Three sisters one act of theatre — what's more,

and what then?

Not how.

Not which.

The sky is great, the earth is great, each person is great.

Strung back and forth, mountains-and-seas, songs sung.

Dong-ge-r-qiang-mie.

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?