Soliloquy

When I was a kid I used to pee a circle into the foot-deep snow and had tremendous fun looking at the images that emerged from the drawing: a picture, a sun, a dream. When I was herding sheep on the prairie and when painting and drawing on paper was not enough for me, I would pick up the sickle and make paths in the grass and connect them into nonsymmetrical figures. The waist deep grass would prevent me from seeing the whole pictures that I created, but this image is branded deeply in my life.

Today I am magnifying that memory, hoping to fulfill those childhood dreams. Constrained by what reality permits, I have to resort to the so-called new media to express my thoughts: building a wall, opening a path (“Tao”), putting up a ladder (the wall refers to the nine-wall installation series; the path/Tao is the title of the series of paintings, “Between the Tao,” of the 1990s; and the ladder is an installation project to put up hydro-ladders in Tiananmen Square and in the North Pole). All these dreams and actions, past and present, are reflections of the inherent inner tensions that I experience. When I do return to the studio and to painting, it is not unlike creating and reproducing those landscapes and experiences, which is highly exhilarating.

Recently I focus more on conceptual developments and medium and material experimentations, while becoming less interested in thinking only in terms of local cultures and ethnic issues. The talk of cultural mission and traditional colors can become empty rhetoric depleted of meaning. I devote instead more attention and energy to studying and creating the intersections and relations among personal language, different mediums, and the larger environment, thus integrating the internal with the external and the visual, while interpreting various themes with familiar materials and signs. A sound, a special smell, a line of light, a breeze, and the wind dust from the eternal past, all bring with them elements from long disappeared ancient civilizations or from other cultures. Their existence in my dreams and spirit is a continuation of the past. To think in terms of the source of ancient civilizations reflects my current state of being. In my project “Interviewing the Past,” for example, I plan to use tens of thousands of symbols and languages to produce softwares and other such artifacts and spread them over various spaces, creating dialogues with other civilizations (e.g., my current installation “Civilization/Landscape” of 100 screen/paintings is part of the project). Or to use my own language and system of symbols and signs to re-create and re-present ancient cultures and civilizations that have long disappeared in the wind, such as ancient Mayan, Babylon, Egyptian civilizations, or the Eastern civilization that still remains in its puberty.

Martyrs did not leave any message.

I use my own language and signs to describe and represent this civilization landscape that has disappeared or is disappearing. With different media (e.g., video, installation, ink on paper, and oil), I express and explore this theme. Reassembling and realigning various languages and signs, I hope to construct a personal language and a new cultural landscape.

Modern civilization will not escape its predecessors’ fate.

The future is an un-scripted fairy tale. All we inherit is only the wind dust, a seed floating in time. Sleepless souls gasping for air in the wind and the snow.

Water floats from above.

Fish swims in the middle.

A road from the beginning to end—no one.

Qin Feng, Beijing