Jan. 20, 2022

"Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man," wrote Dostoyevsky.

I first visited Auschwitz in December 2018; it was awe-inspiring — absolute symmetry everywhere you looked, under the vast sky, snow covering the remnants of brutal logic and insane rationales — that horrifying "will to power"... and the snow, "What brings me close to God is the silence of snow." I desperately wanted to work with that scene, yet, after Paul Celan (a Jew) and Anselm Kiefer (a German), any attempt by me (a young Chinese) would be laughable. I knew there and then that Auschwitz was an empty place; it should be seen without humans, without life. Like a Rothko painting, its beauty depended on that emptiness. But how to paint an empty place?

Now, driven by the external world, which I call "life" (as I was advised that painting celebrities would gain short-term public attention for my work), should I be putting a celebrity into the empty place? (how vulgar!) Where is art in that?

When I watched Jordan Peterson return to his YouTube Q&As after coming out of a traumatic "health crisis" in 2020, he still managed to maintain his brilliant ability to rationally articulate almost everything, but this was punctuated with emotional breakdowns — a fragile man sitting in front of the screen, trying his best to make things clear, trying to hold onto his rational mind — the bulwark of law and order, symbolically called "heaven" in Jungian psychology. A struggle between masculine rationality and the devouring chaos... Can I bring that into an image?

During the trip, I travelled from Auschwitz to Berlin... Visually, Berlin continued that masculine awesomeness I felt from Auschwitz — solemn straight lines brutally dissecting space under the silent infinite sky... It reminded me of the map of Africa (as well as the maps of the USA and Canada) — countries violently divided by straight lines, a terrible beauty.

An aesthetic principle: "反者道之動 (The Opposites drive the Way)" (Laozi).

Jan. 21, 2022

Will – the intellectual inclination (towards the Good)

Idolatry – the intellectual misperception (of the Good)

Jordan Peterson often talked about his Soviet “propaganda art” collection, he collected many portraits of Lenin… By the time I was born, the idolisation of Mao had already gone “out of fashion” in China. Before I was born however, for decades, the image of Mao was the sole subject of Chinese painting. The 3000 years of Chinese civilisation were at their most illiterate and the most inauthentic, what that mad cult of personality created was a moral and aesthetic vacuum. And I grew up in that vacuum. 

Auschwitz, another extreme manifestation of Idolatry. 

“Evil be thou my good.” – a misapprehended Good. 

Both Christian and Confucian philosophers believe that Good is the natural inclination of the human soul (人之初性本善 we are inclined towards the Good by nature). According to Aquinas, insofar as there exists this innate desire for the Good (ultimately God), we create our own gods – substitutes for God. For example, material-mindedness becomes a form of idolatry when the highest Good (God) is equated with fame, money, or power. The substitution of a higher good, whether deliberate or unconscious, constitutes idolatry

Jan. 29, 2022

Symmetry –– Asymmetry

Trying to make the buildings (background) symmetrical, for the man (foreground) is asymmetrical. 

According to the Zohar, both good and evil originate within God. When a balance exists between the divine polar opposites, goodness flows into the world. However, if an imbalance occurs, evil lashes out. Human actions affect this divine equilibrium, determining the manifestation of either good or evil.