Opening
November 28 at 4 PM, 2021
Duration
November 28, 2021 till December 31, 2021
Location
CEAC, Xiamen, China
Artist
After graduating from university in the summer of 2020, I stayed in a mountain primary school as a teacher until today. During this period of my life I often felt some strong oppositions, such as concealment and repetition, reason and emotion, order and imagination. I kept rediscovering the relationship between people and the world, and realised that the beauty of things lies in the chaos, in the vacuum that it reveals when it changes, in the subtle moments that are indifferent between fiction and reality.
One day I read a line from Stevens’ poem: The moon is the mother of pathos and pity. And the image of this little girl immediately came to mind, for I have often been ashamed of myself in her silent and troubled eyes. She is a full moon born early, pacing through the damp, dim bamboo forest and displaying a brief season. Eventually she looks into the abandoned ocean, which responds to her with a violent outburst and a long tremor.
Once I found a graffiti in a student’s book of ancient Chinese poems, drawn by SJQ, What I had them write that time wasa story about Confucius passing by and seeing two children discussing the changing size of the sun. Above that graffiti are the words of the young child mocking Confucius in the original text: Who says you have more wisdom?
During this experience as a teacher, I often fell into this type of question: Am I qualified to influence these children’s memories and help them appreciate theabundance of human emotions? My answer later was to forget the illusory sublimity, the existence, the order, the inseparability of the ever-repeating daily life of all of us. With SJQ’s permission, I collaborated with him on this work.
This is the story of a fishman named Weldon who tells how he lost his left eye in anticipation of psychological solace.
A little boy promised to play a game with me: he would pick 7 stones and hide one in a different place every day, and he would be able to last seven days. Eventually he failed at the end of the sixth day, and the seventh stone was thrown into a rain-soaked spider web.
Thanks to the kids who took part in my shoot and played with me.