This is a tough journey: confronting the self, searching for memories of the past, experiencing the present moment, and looking ahead to the way home. Art is not just a theory but an activity, something that makes one feel alive. This kind of activity requires questioning motives, both conscious and unconscious, with emotions preceding motives. Chasing from memories to poetry, then to childhood and to dreams, but dreams are not where wishes come true, so another journey is needed.
This journey consists of paintings, videos, on-site live broadcasts, and pondering over questions. Painting, despite being pushed to the margins with technological advancements, repeatedly proved its irreplaceability, thereby established an unshakable position. Videos, as retrievable memories, possess unique charm. Live broadcasts have immediate, irreversible linear boundaries. The questions that need to be pondered not only remain unanswered but are also obscure and bewildering: in this project, "boundaries" become a vague and contradictory presence—perception and time, tradition and modernity, introspection and self-realization, myth and history, nature and artificiality, etc. The contemplation of these boundaries constitutes the evolutionary process in my spatiotemporal perspective. I hope to embark on a long-awaited pursuit in the most familiar and yet most liberating way to me—art.
The choice of geographical location is based on my childhood experiences at a certain place and my subsequent trips back there, every arrival and departure. I brought back locally sourced minerals and my memories there back to the studio and completed these paintings, and later returned to these locations to generate videos. Subsequently, each of these paintings will detach from its original series and become a new artwork with a new title, integrating its specific spatial location and on-site video. The significance of the geographical location lies not only in the physical space itself but also in tracing the time and space of its long past.
The ideals of Laozi and Zhuangzi, as well as Zen Buddhism are to "let go of oneself and then travel around the world" and "be silent yet sound like thunder." This time, however, I cannot “act with a mind devoid of thought." Just as the impetus for the big bang was internal collapse, I will begin a new round of self-compression with questions in my mind.
Kang Chunhui, May 30th, 2023
