Talking Behind The Wall’s Back

Listening To The Wall

Behind closed doors, nestled in my studio, the walls formed a womb, protecting me and my laziness. I snuggled in the corner of my studio with a book, wrapped in a quilt, my head against the wall. Voices from the other side of the wall crept up my skull into my head, the laughings and whisperings. 

The book is called The White Book, and it's written by a Korean woman about everything related to white. It was only twenty pages of effort, and I began to wander, simply flipping the pages and going through meaningless English, empty-minded. But I slowly saw the white she described. It wasn't the color of linen or the warm white paint of the studio wall. It was the white for the seminar room, clean, intangible, cold, without a trace of impurities.

The Wall Is Too White

I don't like this white. I’ve complained to my classmate that the walls for artwork installation are too white and too bright, which makes the artworks feel like objects and separated from the rest of the world. It also explains why my mind wandered when I went through the book: compared to the white pain of migraine mentioned at the beginning of the book, the shroud for the dead baby and Warsaw are too beautiful and pure, like the first thin layer of snow, that makes me refuse to be the one to stamp on the perfect white.

Wall Repair

My job is to repair the wall. After each week's critique, I would join a few classmates to fill in the holes where the nails had been drilled and repaint the patched areas. It gave me more time to be with walls, which also gave me subtle feelings about the wall. James said I must have liked patching the walls. I don't deny it, but I only like to fill in the holes, not the later painting part. It is because the scars on the wall can be judged as guilty or innocent. The violence remained by drilling leaves the white wall with a hideous black, while the spackling paste used for patching leaves a warm white that is harmonious with the rest of the wall. It does not affect the white atmosphere in the environment, but somehow adds some traces of usage and an emotional appeal to the wall.

There Is Always A Wall

Junichiro Tanizaki is probably the man who hated white and cleanliness the most, stubbornly defending the beauty of shadow and stain in the eastern aesthetic. He questioned if the color of industrial products would be in a more Asian-friendly earthy tone if the Industrial Revolution started in Asia. It had something to do with the color of our skin, he wrote in In Praise of Shadow, that white people have pure white skin, and we Asians have an earthy skin color. So white people need to build another bright and clean civilized world to foil their skin, while the color in our skin has a will to blend into nature.

I don't think my ancestors have ever seen such white walls. It was only after concrete constructions entered China that we began to be surrounded by white walls. With the development of modernization, there have only been white walls left in cities since the time I was born, so I had never seen the moss-covered, damp wooden walls that Tanizaki described. The white that surrounded me in home, school, and galleries was like the wooden color of Tanizaki’s time. It became the swaddle of my memory, in childhood, in youth, in adulthood. Behind every person I talked to, every event I got involved in, and every artwork I looked at, there was a white wall.

What's on the wall?

When critiquing in the hallway, I always felt I could see through the wall into the seminar room. Although the wall is thick, it is also a membrane that separates the inside from the outside, and I can have contact with the world on the other side of the wall when the light beacons through the wall. 

I never noticed them before I came to this school, but the poor lighting and the lengthy critique made the silent wall start to talk with me, and gradually moved me from noodling at the painting to staring at the white wall. The parts that are lightened too bright and the parts crying for the warmth of the light, the pencil marks that didn’t get painted over last week, the shadows cast by the frames, and the loose threads at the bottom of the canvas that haven't been cut, these gradually replaced the authoritativeness of the paintings on the walls, quietly protesting about their own existence.