Shan Hai Jing · Classics of Mountains and Seas

“Insects and worms”.

He imagined being beaten by his own son.

Old Master Zhao.

FUCK YOU!

Ai Weiwei's middle finger.

Mand in China.

“The gentleman moves his mouth, not his hands.”

Obama said: no single country can solve the problem of climate change alone.

Wu Ma: “I want to sleep with you.”

Paris Agreement.

Hi everybody. Before you fire up the barbecue for the long weekend, I want to talk a little bit about the reason we get to celebrate Labor Day – and that's the labor movement that helped build this country and our middle class.

Ah Q did not know how to read or write. People made him draw a circle. The first time in his life he held a brush, he wanted to draw a round circle himself, but his hand trembled, and instead it came out the shape of a melon-seed.

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?