She

Full Essay

“She”

In 2010 the artist returned home and met with an emotional deception — “she” lived with him for a year under a fabricated identity and made off with his savings. The philosophical complexity of this deception lies in the ontologically ironic juxtaposition it forms with another memory: a year earlier, the girlfriend of his friend Digua had quietly fallen in love with the artist and brought eight wooden painting boards to Lijiang, their fronts covered with love poems as a declaration. The two women share the same set of boards, yet point to opposite ontological fates — the former a sincerity that “exists but is not perceived,” the latter a falsity that is “perceived but does not exist.” This event also laid the groundwork for going north to seek immortals and the Way, the Wuyi Mountain residency, and taking up residence in Jingdezhen.

The love of Digua's girlfriend was ontologically real and self-sufficient, yet epistemologically unknowable to the artist. Her choice of a year-long delay and the material medium of wooden painting boards is an excess of sincerity. Yet this doubled sincerity was not received, and the boards became a delayed ruin that existed but was never read. A year later, “she” appeared in the identity of a fiancée; all her identifying information was fabricated, and the year of living together was a carefully calculated performance. Ontologically, “she” is non-existent — identity, history and feeling all a disguise of nothing; epistemologically, “she” was perceived in full. The artist kept those eight boards and recorded “her” daily life on the back. The front is a sincerity that exists but is not perceived; the back is a misrecognition that is perceived but does not exist.

The eight wooden boards became an ontological battlefield. Structurally, they are empty signifiers; deconstructively, they are traces of différance; psychoanalytically, they are two incarnations of objet a. The artist did not know the truth while recording “her,” and this blindness is the paradox of a subject who believes he can see through appearances and is instead used. The “She” exhibition was held at the “Four Cats” café by Cuihu in Kunming, and the café as a third space dissolved the ritual character of the white cube. Viewers turned the boards over, and every turning is the alternating appearance of existence and perception, constituting a kind of ontological archaeology.

After the exhibition, the artist chose to forgive “her” and let her go. This is not moral pardon but subtraction at the ontological level — subtracting the attachment to existence, the trust in perception, the possession of the real. From the Stoic view, this is the practice of following nature; from the Buddhist view of emptiness, it is the cultivation of breaking attachment. More hidden still, the artist needed to forgive Digua's silence — that barrier of information which pushed the two ontological fates into an irreversible crossing.

The “She” exhibition is the key node in the artist's turn from an ontological subject to a subject seeking the Way. The eight boards proved that existence does not guarantee being perceived, and perception does not guarantee existence. This awakening led to going north to seek immortals and the Way — after feeling had been thoroughly deconstructed, does there exist a possibility beyond the binary opposition of existence and perception? The tea ceremony of Wuyi Mountain and the ceramics of Jingdezhen gradually released the artist from the dialectic of subject and object, and brought him into the realm of forgetting both thing and self. From “She” to “the Way,” a paradigm shift was completed from ontological anxiety to existential quiet.