Shan Hai Jing · Classics of Mountains and Seas

Big Cuttlefish.

It seems today's mountains are entirely green.

The water is exceedingly clear.

Sweat-drenched, the woods beside the mountain.

The fragrance of cypress drifts.

On the moss-covered stones, her tears turn in the bright sunlight.

Down the slope —

a pool of jade-green water.

The mountain-folk say:

Fish-clan;

here it is called Big Cuttlefish.

Walking on —

flowers fly and butterflies dance…

Earth-piled houses, the city's small fresh-style.

The little shop at the village gate.

She asks: “What is Shan Hai Jing?”

By the road a small child is playing.

I joke: Shan Hai Jing… heh-heh! The child by the road looks plump and joyful — let's just catch him and eat him…

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?