Hanging Words
An Installation Art Project
Project Overview:
I was into studying the art of traditional Chinese seal carving for a long time. In the art of seal carving, the concave part of the carving surface is called yin, while the protruding part is called yang. In this art I translate my understanding of the complementarity and symmetry between heaven and earth, and the unity of opposites in everything, into the embrace of yin and yang in carving.
The calligraphy is written in Tang Dynasty lyric style. The lyric and the art speak for me as a person, holding an international background and a pure, passionate heart roots in Asia, culture in my home country, the breeze on a hot summer evening, the chirping of summer cicadas and insects from the living room with the laughter of open conversation. I felt like there was a segregation inside my body, the barrier to make them two as an integrity. I appreciated UK because it has been the soil, the foundation of the belief that I could pursue a freedom - it gave me this belief and left me in the dream. Most international students from Asia that I came across, were facing serious unemployment because of the high threshold they had to meet in order to earn a living for themselves, the exclusion, gentrification in minds, they felt in society, and the struggle of being accompanied, understood, empathised with.
"We can't go back now, we have already embraced an independent and integrated way of thinking and perceiving. My family can not accept that I have a tattoo, date people, or have opinions in homosexuality, marriage, choice of jobs. What they want is to be with me forever and have me at dinner every night."
My best friend from Henan, China, said it to me when she was taking me to Heathrow Airport. I was going to fly back to Shanghai, to visit my family, and my hometown, which I had been far away from for two and a half years. And at that time, I recently graduated with no degree certificate due to the national marking boycott by UCU (University and College Union). I thought it would be a journey to find out myself as person, however the strong withdrawn symptoms made me find it difficult to communicate my opinions with people that I was so familiar with. There is a barrier in this society where I grew up, that requires my obedience to entry, while I had started to build up myself as a person from scratch.
I used to be a painter but this time my emotions were so intense that I had to put it in a container. Installation was the vessel. It was hanging from fifth-floor height. The transparent silk is so fragile, yet it carries heavy thoughts. The black frame at the top imprisons my origin, the silk drapes and swings down, and natural gravity distorts the shape of the thoughts
Development:
My sketch was based on traditional Chinese calligraphy of the style of seal carving. I then carved the Chinese characters on a thick wooden board for the use of ink transfer. In order to have different colours on both sides, I brushed the board in calligraphy black ink first and print on the silk. The silk is finely knitted and very light. Then I brushed the board in white watercolour paints and print on the other side of the silk, overlapping the existing black print.
The Window of the Stolen Words
So, we have come to the opening:
Not of a void, not of a nihility
the Medium that refuses naming,
it lives on the serving,
the hands that clings upon the
rusting of the frame,
redden and green,
while our decades past,
and now,
it has come to this.
The voice taunts the atony,
the blood's humming, beneath the skin,
Of our rhetoric, as its threads break,
fell the clenching of fists,
it had been fused with a pair of rein:
the hoops were clicking, and --
silvering sheen, darkling winds.
It had set out to find
the right words, for the ones
Who line up without the rush of harking
picking upon the buried seeds
and the ovums scattering.
And now, it has come to
the Jewels of Rossetti,
the ones of the drippings --
the Tower has been built,
and I sat, anguish with a temporal belief
weaves from the faces of my gods
All of them, are of implicit bronze
mirroring a lack
of my long renounced kin.
Who knows if he was truly one of
those steeds, clad by the swirling of East,
and the states were warring, drilling
For the inks, reducing my typography
No, petite Mathilde, lend not your veil to me,
Our attributes are of two
familial spaces,
and this Void of Not,
cannot afford the abruptness of
Another cranial need,
As if this night could contain
another opposition,
stringed by the horse who had long left me:
We, we, so I have said at the beginning,
but I could never be sure of the
Bravery, lies within the monotonus
uttering:
Deny, deny, all the buzzlights
when we were one line
fixed to break my goodbye
by admitting the edge of my sloped city:
Until it comes, the carnival
made from the centrurial woods and tar
and the delayed ceremonial bliss,
for one dawn of every year,
A blade would cut through the window:
dews roll down on its sharpness
its ecstasy points straight to the Eye:
A legible silence.
2023.6.12
