I was able to concentrate and became for some time a sort of gargantuan ear that listened to murmurs and echoes and whispers, far-off voices that filtered through the walls.
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
CIRCLE TIME
Once in a spiritual quiz, when asked "describe all of this in one word", I answered "circle". Later in Stories of Your Life, I read about in the language system of the Alien-the Heptapods, the cause and the effect are no longer apart, and everything that happens is no longer a succession of events but presents as a whole. In this language-dominated narrative labyrinth, the present moment and the past establish a cycle in an ouroboros gesture.
Language is presented in time, and human thought is embedded in time; time, language and thought are always entwined and internally coherent. The time-space structure is the most basic form of human reasoning, and from Schopenhauer onwards the world as a manifestation is identified as being in a certain time and place, and with a certain causal relationship. The perceived 'linear' character of language and logical thought draws on the fact that time is understood as a unidirectional, irreversible, linear process. However, I am saddened by the fact that events only occur in linear sequence in the space of the present. For the nostalgic, linear time means a departure from the beautiful things of the past, a destruction of sameness, a series of differences and unpredictability.
Often, when I am absent-minded, I perceive time as a vast field, just as I can see the future in a holistic perspective after learning the language of the Heptapods. The past and the future are embedded in the space where this physical body is at the moment, and the 'unreal' and the 'real' are collaged together in a sort of crowded harmony.
At the end of Unit 1, I quoted a section from Milan Kundera's Slowness; I would quote it again from a different perspective:
Speed is the form of trance... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words, he is in a state of trance; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear...
Whereas Freud characterised the unconscious as being timeless, Lacan argues that the unconscious is related to time. This is because the unconscious has a linguistic-competent structure and unfolds in a time dimension. In the situation of the 'trance', I can experience two states of consciousness at once - the concentration and spirituality of oblivion of self-presence, and the detachment from the immediate present. This gives 'trance' the privilege of wandering between 'being in' and 'being out', avoiding and even resisting the linear time.
From the logical structure of I Ching's yin and yang, the five elements and the four periods matching the four directions, the ancient Chinese concept of time spreads out over four spatial orientations rather than going on eternally in a forward path; it is therefore a sealed loop that constantly returns to its point of origin, with reversibility, in pursuit of symmetry and stability. It implies a poetic origin.
My work Hiding and Escaping is conceived as a tribute to this poetic origin. Bergson says that life is like a flowing stream, integral and indivisible. The river symbolizing time connects the unknown light in the distance to the viewer; the tiny jewel stands uncertainly in the place of time - 'the present'. Memories of the past exist in this episodic moment without a karmic connection. I use dyed fabric canvases, painted with a thinner medium, to create hazy, blurred, or washed traces that suggest a dislocation of continuous time from physical time.
SPACE
How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one's entire life.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Borges, a favourite author of mine, often plays with the idea of space in his work. Such as the infinitely extended library in the Library of Babel; the endless Book of Sand; a gloomy basement in Aleph where there is an infinite universe of space, which is condensed into a small ball just 2 cm in diameter - something grand that takes place in a confined space. As Bachelard claims, small spaces establish a connection with one's intimate emotions. When I was a child, I would put my favourite novelties in a drawer; I would build tiny nests out of pillows; I would love to dive into a closet full of winter clothes and imagine that I would be in another dimension when I opened the door. The small space was no longer just a container or a physical space, but an extension of perception, a spiritualised physical space.
The process of making Magic Giant Tree
In my painting Magic Giant Tree, glorious memories are the enveloping base layer, and the night in the present moment rushes lushly down, where space and time overlap. I intend to present a multiplicity of temporal dimensions on a medium-sized, restricted canvas. I renovated a previous painting, keeping part of the previous image and covering part of it with gesso. The canvas, as a carrier of the 'once', extends from the purely physical status of a paint carrier to become an overlap of two time periods. As in The Memory of Eddie Finch, the fireplace is built from the remains of a former house - a portal through which time overlaps, allowing a passage from physical space to mental space.
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SYMBOLS
I have analysed my desire " to paint " itself. Excluding thinking about the viewer, if a painting is fully conceived before it begins because of the purposefulness of its content, then the only meaning left for me in the act of painting is the compliance, the challenge, and the solution from the production of the imagination projected into the physical - so that painting itself becomes a technological problem. And this idea frustrates me. I humbly state: spontaneous painting, searching for consciousness through working, is the most meaningful way of working for me as a painter.
In art, the source of creative activity is attributable to the subconscious, and when the subconscious is impressed, fantasy arises.
I make up and paint emotions into symbolic object, and so an ownership relationship can be formed with the emotion. This relationship creates a pathway for my feelings - I see myself as an object too, turning the world into a collection of symbols and recognising myself in the various symbols. The symbol is an 'illusion' - precisely because 'the symbol is a sign with a signifier', the real being is replaced, obscured. Thus, Lacan argues that the moment when things are given names, they are controlled by representations and concepts, that is the point when they begin to lose their vitality and become unable to be talked about in their entirety. Concepts emerge when things begin to fade away.
Mr. Palomar feels that he fully understands the great albino ape, its need to hold an object in a world where everything is fleeting in order to calm the unease that this solitary situation brings it ... Such as seeing itself as an object too, turning the world into a collection of symbols as well as recognising itself in the various symbols.
The protagonist in Mr. Palomar talks about an encounter with a great albino gorilla at a zoo in Barcelona where he sees it pressing a rubber tyre against his chest. The tightly held tyre carries the wishful projection of the white gorilla's (or Palomar's) feelings, attached with the attribute of consolation. The self symbolises itself because what the self wants to see in the other is a stable and recognisable form, a form that makes the self-more unified and consistent.
Based on this tyre I created R UO Han (which was named after a friend because I noticed a strange similarity between them). In the image is a hollow circular object in the process of splitting or birthing, forming fleetingly the symbol of 'infinity'. The purpose is, as Jean Baudrillard says in Why hasn't everything already disappeared, that everything is driven by a feverish desire to break away from its materiality and abstract itself. "There is a gradual break with the world, in the final stage of which the Other disappears and we are left to perpetuate ourselves with relish but with fear and disgust, the whole historical process being reduced to a spiral of self-referentiality (spirale autoréférentielle)."
In literature, the complexity and multiplicity of language itself allow readers to empathise with their own experiences. But how do images create complexity in a restricted space that allows the viewer to keep digging, to make the intellectual form of thought visually relevant? According to Rudolf Arnheim, the only bridge between vision and thought is 'imagery', the memory of sensual consciousness, the result of the external world is perceived and realised through the senses.
Miró's surrealist works depict purely abstract images of the subconscious. It seems like childhood graffiti, yet the viewer has a longing to communicate with it in depth. The primary influence on Miró's paintings is childhood experience, "Freud believed that creative inspiration relied on the artist's ability to uncover the lost imagination and inspiration of childhood through memory and perception." Miró's artistic aspirations to regain the innocence of a happy childhood are expressed in his work. These subconscious psychological activities bring artistic creation back to its essence, searching for the fulfillment and realisation of early wishes, thus creating a satisfying illusion of perception.
The abstract art form of Miró's work is characterised by a strong sense of serendipity, where objects roam freely in an undisciplined and mysterious setting. Symbols are mirrors that express instinct and desire, joy and sadness. Miró's works are such magical mirrors.
The symbol immediately splits into the symbol itself and what it signifies (the signifier and the signified). The symbolic order is what operates behind a hidden world. I am interested in exploring ways of producing involuntary symbols through the hidden order of operation.
Planetary: Serpent from other hills is a work of fantasy produced abstractly through the hint of texts. Meditating on the Chinese proverb 'the stone from other hills can be used to break the jade', I was given a draft of a block entangled in curved lines. As I gazed at this draft, the image of a snake and a mountain floating in the void emerged naturally. In this way, an idea is created that is not neutered by language, not as a symbol but as the subject itself. The subject as will and representation is replaced by a vague and insubstantial subject - and exists in this snake. I chose a small canvas for this work (25*35cm) to confront the moving time with a condensed space.
For the cryptic ego, Haruki Murakami has a metaphor of a double floor: the ground floor is for feasting with others, the first floor is for reading and music alone; there is also a basement in the building for storing things that are not normally used, and this is where the day usually ends. But beneath this, there is a second basement level, total darkness where no entrance can be found anywhere.
In the 2022 Biennale Venezia Arsenale, Italian pavilion, as I walked through the factory, where all human presence had been erased, to the cabin, facing the darkened waterway, the silent vibration almost engulfed me.
I felt my 'presence' dissolved by the darkness, the emptiness, in front of me. No painting or sound was surrounding me - without the object there, it is difficult to perceive the subject as well. It is as if I am just a living being, and the theme is void until the canon appears.
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Unit3, where I reflected on and summarised the development of my work over the year.
Spontaneity is still vital to me, yet the beginning of my work has turned from emotional catharsis to exploration of the self; the trigger has changed from a simple external stimulus (transforming a favourite story, dissatisfaction with ignorant ideology, etc.) to a combination of personal experience (desires, dreams, memories, etc.) with external stimuli.
In my way of working, I still prefer to use figurative objects observed as references. And then transform them into readable narrative image symbols, extend them poetically and spiritually.
Due to my use of abstraction and simplification, with the difference between linguistic symbolism and understanding, it’s important to avoid the work becoming an empty and narcissistic conceptual pile-up.
In general, I understand the meaning of making art as ''the pursuit of a richer perception and the inquiry of the rules of the universe'' for me.
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