Artist Statement

On Distance

Why do your paintings look so distanced, where no figure or focal point could be found? How far is further than far? Where were you standing while seeing this?

Every city is the same. Standing in the shadow of tall buildings and looking up at the unreachable roof and a corner of the sky framed by the buildings, I felt like a frog at the bottom of a well. Born in the well, I thought the sky was just that size, but I still looked up with envy.

I was born in Beijing. Born as an ordinary working-class in China's most centralized city, I experienced more of the structural injustices of power dynamics. Growing up around people who were born with much more resources, I felt the tininess and the impossibility of class jumps, just like the fish in the well never swam out of the water and the frog at the bottom of the well never jumped out of it. To only be able to look up, to only be allowed to look up, expecting them to be the protagonists of their lives and to be our leaders in the future, I learned to enslave myself and to grovel. I eliminated the self to be ordinary, stripped off my human skin, turned into a blade of grass, and perched at the foot of the trees, praising the greatness of the trees.

Beijing is a plain, but artificial mountains have been built out of tall buildings. Being in the mountains of architecture, I never got to see the panorama of a mountain. If we want to see a mountain clearly, we need to get out of this mountain and climb onto another one, raising my height to stand at the same level as it. I looked forward to an eye level of equality. I need to meet the heads of the tall buildings to communicate and to get along with people equally to stop looking up.

A few years later, I learned to look at people head-on in a place far away from Beijing. It’s simple to eye-level with people, as facing each other only requires to stand up from kneeling. But eye-leveling a mountain needs distance, let alone with the huge mountain accumulated by thousands of years of history.

Chinese landscape painting is not only about painting mountains and water but also about inscribing the things that are not allowed to be written in the form of painting, such as the nostalgia of the remnants of the previous dynasty. Even if dynasties changed, the mountains never changed, the water would still flow, and the distant horizon would be the continuous linearity of history. When I'm talking about ruins, I'm not only talking about the ruins right in front of me. We are in the ruins, we are in the prosperous grassland after the ruins, and we are in the dust that will soon be piled up into future ruins.

In Walter Benjamin's writing on the angel of history, he allegorized the viewer of history as an angel, facing the past and having its back against the future. Seeing the ruins of catastrophes of the present piling up in its eyes, it couldn't grab on any but was blown to the future by the storm of progress, unable to stay in the ruins of the present.

Viewing horizontally, I was not standing at the feet of this angel, but somewhere outside the stream of history, viewing history from its side. I was standing at a station, watching the buses of the past pass before me, but did not get on any of them, because I avoided regard any individual as different, and the present felt no more special than the past.

We distance ourselves to see less and hide ourselves in the crowd to feel less, especially when pain is too hard to face. Pain is difficult to describe or convey. I could not express the pain of being under the extreme power dynamic directly unless foreignizing feudalism into divinity and mythology as my language of agency, as I don't really have a religious belief. It's like why Paul Celan needed to reinvent German to allow himself to distance from familiar language and to write about the Holocaust. In turning illustrative imagery into formal painting language, the critical distance protected and enabled me to reflect on the past.

Moving to the vertical side, I got on one of the buses, sat in the back row, looked into the past like the angel, confronting the catastrophes. From crouching animals to standing human beings, our perspective became narrow but high. Even if no single grass can declare itself different, focusing on each grass and each image allows me to see clearer of their individual history. In the attempt of staying with the suffering of each individual in the vertical setting, I eventually neglected and forgot them again in the horizontal landscape of ruins they formed.