On Ruins

Cultivating on a scrap of land given by another man, I bent down into the body of a mule. With my face against the ground and my back against the sky, I had no strength to think about the meaning of my toil. By gluing hay onto a carpet, I called this process farming. I placed the grass on the carpet in the shapes like the movement of horses, just as farmers sing folk songs in the fields. From barren to overgrown, I watched and lived with this field day and night, imagining the leased land being stained by my chants. Until it was rudely uprooted by someone, mounted on a white wall, and named a painting. One said he saw a dying horse, another said she saw ruins.

I felt a little ashamed. Why is my secret land hanging up there? It glowed in the gallery light: the barren loess turned into extravagant golden glitters, and the earth where no grain was harvested became a flattering euphony. The thing on the wall was not a work, but a human skin stuffed with hay, a body nailed on a horizontal display. It was more like a cockroach that had been smacked by a slipper. Before the slipper fell, the cockroach hastened to stretch into an elegant gesture before its death. Crushed flat into a painting, its organs and bodily fluids were squeezed out and spread all across the picture, rust reds, ochre yellows, charcoal blacks, and phosphate blues, but its carapace is still shining, disguising itself to be a scarab.

If a painting wants its audience to stay longer, it slows down the viewing and guides the viewer to concentrate and go deeper with its imagery. I don't want this attention, or affection. This carpet thing is just a gorgeously dressed cockroach, what is the need to take a second look at it? It reminds me of the burnt Summer Palace, where only marble rubble remained, and people nowadays only envision the pale marble columns whenever they mention the palace. But these stone architectures of the Western Garden only sat as a corner of the Summer Palace, where the majority of wooden buildings were already down to ashes and no longer existed. It’s ironic that the visible ruins are always the survivors, and mourning for what is left in front of our eyes is merely the nostalgic fantasies over the glory or regret of the past. My land is painted into a similar ruin. Even if the paint outlined its former appearance, there is no means for it to be romanticized. Dead is dead, and a beautiful corpse is eventually no different from feces.

But grasses grew over my dead body. I planted them a straw by another. I once told a critic that I felt like a walking corpse, in exile on the other side of the Earth, dragging an overly heavy unexamined history. She laughed and said I had no responsibility or ability to carry it. We are all guests of the land, blown onto it to take roots with no choice, grind to dust and scattered to mud, where new seeds land on our bodies after our death and grow again just like us: we have always been the rank grass. As how the material drifted away from the imagery, the grass has also formed its narrative on the ground long since. While the horses ran past the carpet like the untraceable dust of history, the grass rooted in the carpet completed the proof of the persistence of time through generations. It’s not a sad story. Even if the gravels of the Summer Palace have long been out of matter, the crumps of grasses under the columns have survived and thrived from the old Qing Dynasty ever since.