On Metaphor

Stop using metaphors!

It's impossible. Ever since I started speaking, my choice of words and my way of thinking have been full of metaphors. Chinese tends to be implicit and euphemistic, with few certain or straightforward expressions, especially when it comes to emotional expression. Speaking out about feelings can be seen as self-centered, narcissistic, and arrogant, so we reach for objects and scenes from Chinese poetry to suggest what we're feeling. The moon is the nostalgia for home, the willow is the joy of spring, cheap booze is the sorrow of life, and the unmown lawn is a country in turmoil. When I close my eyes, I cannot see the endless sorrow in our hearts. I see the cars that drove by on their way to work, the white wall behind the person who said that word, and the ceiling that reflected my heart when I couldn’t sleep. The memories roll over and over when they overlap with language and become poems of resentment, that parallels with the arising of content in my art.

Memory’s Carrier

Many people have others in their memories. They observe people's expressions and behaviors, from the rise of the little finger when picking up the teacup to the glimpse of someone’s smile at a party. But I rarely look at people. I'm afraid they will notice me or look me in the eye. Even in remembering what someone said, I latch onto something around or behind them: bricks, white walls, grass, windows, cups, concrete floors. These backgrounds of human activity carry the images in my memory. Unconsciously, I give these inorganics emotion and consciousness. When those memories are pushed into my brain like a disc and played again, the color, the temperature, the weight, and the pressure of the wind are given back to me, and they began to spread from the first grass until all the emotions of that time swallow me up.

Humanoid Nature

Growing up surrounded by gray matchbox-like buildings, I rarely draw the straight lines of city. My paintings follow the shape of nature, and I couldn’t accept the grids in abstract paintings. I also hate the rectangular frame: why should the gravitated and connected world be so confined in an artificial box? Unlike the assembly lines that humans design for industrial goods, life in nature can grow at will. Though my life does not take place in nature, I still have to draw from nature, because the way natural beings grow corresponds to the movement of my body when I paint. When I make art, I start from the forms of plants or the gullies of the earth, finding traces and patterns of human activity in nature. I’m not making art for nature but using nature as a metaphor for the permeability and fluidity of human relationships with the outer world and with other people. It is not a celebration of nature, but an urban middle-class fantasy of pastoral poetry. We know that nature is there, but we don’t really enter its arms and feel its pulse. We use the natural image to describe the interpersonal relationship we cannot say—it is a lyrical fantasy.

Walking With The Words

“The seminar room is shrouded in blue because it is cold at night”; “The ground is red in the sun and blue in the shadow”; “The grass grows like morning stretching”... Before true perceptions reach the end of the nerve, descriptive words always arrive first and block at the door to spiritual connection. Verbal memory is deceptive. It conjures rhetoric, like photo editing, that distorts reality into a familiar, habitual, comfortable aesthetic——a cliché. I do not intend to abandon the narrativity of remembrance: story sustains my joy in creation, brings me closer to my work by bypassing abstract concepts, and gives me a vertical vision of time outside the frame.

These works are the entanglement and continuation of imageries that slip into my sight and trigger my emotions inadvertently. The randomness of the reason for creation flows with the stream of consciousness: there is no clear destination, where the boat chooses to tide and anchor. On the bus back to Baltimore, clouds came to my eyes again. I opened the memo that I hadn’t used in three months and wrote, “It is hilarious that one only writes when one returns to one’s self.” When embraced in affection and happiness, one does not have breaks for clouds. I'm back, I'm back, typing on my phone, venting my loneliness, compulsively associating everything that flutters by with the refinement of art, while the admonition that art should not be at the mercy of words kept ringing. It must be the bus’s air conditioning’s fault, why is it so damn cold again, just like the seminar room in last November, or, now.