By Artist Wang Xin
In early 2019, due to the COVID-19 outbreak and my father's aggravated illness, I returned to my hometown Guilin and stayed there for more than half a year. Being back in my country land, breathing the moist plum rain once again, feeling wet and scorched alternately. After days and nights of downpour, the stones took on a dark color that would seem never dry. A lot of the childhood past emerged from deep down my body. My secondary school, that school situated on a mountain with caves. The image of those cool, earthy rocks flashed back. Suddenly I realized that those memories had been hidden in me all the time and had been flowing through my painting hands. On the wild hills, shoots of oleander leaf burst out in the morning sunlight, so powerful and subtle as if in a slow-motion film. The buds confront the scorching sun with all their youthful strength. Covered in light dust, the pink oleanders were in spectacular full bloom, only waiting to be buried and rot in the mud after heavy rainfall. Fragrance and smell are a natural sensory pair that can never be fully separated. For me, that is a clear manifestation of the life force, the endless cycle of life and death, same time, same place. This intense and direct revelation prompted me to draw about the mountains and plants in Guilin. Most of them are watercolor and ink on paper.
In August 2020, my father passed away. I stared into his serene face in silence. No fear, only softness, his face was dappled with sunlight streaming through the door and the refraction of light from the glass window, fragmented and merged with the faint lines and marks on his face. I saw an experience like seeing the rocks in Guilin, the kind of free flow between the organic and the inorganic. The skull will break down and decompose. Calcium and phosphorus will be absorbed by plants. New orders and compounds will be created from chaos and disarray. This is where I began to associate the skull and flesh with the metamorphoses between organic and inorganic matters.
What color can be chosen to express the first eyewitness perspective, so real that nothing is hidden, but can also convey a feeling of displacement of time and consciousness that merge everything into oneness? Flesh, plants, all matters are spiritual. I used a lot of pearl white color at first. Later, I accidentally picked up some bright green pastel and drew it on military green paper. When bright green was applied on military green, it suddenly acquired a sense of transparency, a floating and psychedelic tone. Also, pastel is a material that bears resemblance to sand and mud. Just as a child would often paint with mud stone on the ground, and as soon as it touches the ground, it left lumps of powder and mud. This strong sense of materiality instantly transported me back to the state of being a “jungle kid” in my youth. With such primitive excitement, I began to develop my green series, starting from skulls, skeletons, human bones, hands, and torsos, submerging myself in the sensuality of the present, twisting and restoring the bodies to the primitive, animalistic state, slowly building up a dense, tropical human “jungle”.
It is a “jungle” where humanity, post-humanity, and transcendental feelings converge. I'm fascinated by anthroposophy [founded by Rudolf Steiner]. In his theory, human bodies, plants, and stars are all physical manifestations of a complex and exalted world of spiritual beings, in other words, you can glimpse into the essence of the universe from every natural being. Changes and circulations are such generous and unbridled forces in nature that the distinction between life and death seems trivial.
In this dense “jungle” world, only the Soul and Flesh matter. The social aspects of human life are excluded. It is more about pure life and death, being-towards-death, the supreme sense of life in full-bloom ecstasy. I want to build up a space where human bodies can dissolve into things, and things into stars, where people twitch like animals, fight, have sex, and cling to nature, delighted by a handful of earth or a drop of sunlight. People breed, in dirt, moist and stench. Just like the fragrance of flowers and plants, they all belong to the world of senses. Voluptuous and rotten flesh, blossoming plants, without any pretension, a dense forest full of horror and gain, but never afraid of death. The hysterical feeling of being “alive”. People, animals, plants, rocks, and sacrifices all coexist and multiply in this “jungle”.
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