Ennui of No Name
I stayed in my hometown for two months. I rarely interacted with people and spent most of the time walking along the country roads and ridges, taking photos, writing novels and painting. Gradually something that I had lost came back. I tried to organize my works and started to make garments as manifestations of my feelings during this period to answer the question - WHO AM I?
Although Ennui of No Name does not directly answer this question, it offers a sense of communion, a feeling of being on the edge of the society yet still feeling good in your own skin, a feeling appears on a summer afternoon, when you are lying alone in bed, when you are languishing.
When I talked to my photographer, Yuhan Cheng, about the concept and communion of this project, he felt its unspeakable touch too. We hit it off immediately, and began searching aimlessly for shooting locations in fields throughout Peng.
July is the hottest time of year in the Southwest. From morning to night, we searched and discussed the script and its emotions, this indefinable 'feeling' was at the heart of our project. In the photographs, you see the girls' faces blurred with sweat, you see their bare soles sinking into the gravel of the river, and you see their tired faces at night.
Outside the photographs, I see Yuhan sun-tanned back, I see my face red and swollen from heatstroke, and I see the silent ridge at night. All of these are sentiments are held the in photographs, and films and in the sweat that dripped down and our bodies that are tanned under the harsh sun, we tried to document these sentiments. It appeared in me, in Yuhan, in the models, in the bull strolling in the field, or in any moment experienced by anyone. A sense of satisfaction that is lost and despondent. It is the feeling of satisfaction risen from dejection and loss that throws out and answers the question—WHO AM I?
When I started to conceive Ennui of No Name 游荒, I was in a hurry to finish the exhibition of my previous work AH X 阿叉. In AH X, I was passionate about peeling apart my memories and crumbling them up to feed the audience. This excitement suddenly disappeared. I can feel the words hanging on the edge of my lips getting swallowed back, and my head in a state of confusion and swelling.
I couldn't think of a solution for a while, so I took the only six hundred Yuan I had left after squandering a summer and went South for the first time, trying to find a job.
Every roadside tree and every speck of dust in this fast-growing city were arranged by invisible hands, and I was living on a sofa in my friend's 27 square feet loft. At eight o'clock in the morning, the sun shone through the vine shelves outside my window, and I could see particles floating in the air, together with the smell of stir-fry from the restaurant downstairs. The first day of early autumn came and I found a job with the recommendation of a friend.
Before the three months internship was over, I had an even greater sense of emptiness and void that I could not name. Not only was I questioning my previous works but I was also very tired of the so-called 'design process' and the whole commercial industry. Although I pretended to be an independent thinker, I was no different from many others in the industry. I followed the same rules.I repeated them over and over.
What is the difference? Who am I? Is art really something that can be done according to a certain set of rules?
I felt more upset at my own ignorance and shallowness. All these thoughts were like boiling water: they threw questions at me like unceasing bubbles and then fizzle into reality.
"Mentally debilitated" - that's how the middle-aged male tenant who lived on the bottom floor of our apartment always described himself. He’d say it when he asked us to whisper and walk softly on our feet at all times. What an accurate term for people who live in a highly developed megalopolis where life and dreams are the same as those of many others who have been crushed with the precision of this city monster's iron teeth.
Some unspeakable emotion affected me, and I left my internship earlier than I had planned. With my nerves in tatters and my strained right knee - I returned to my hometown to spend the whole spring in a rural county in the Southwest.
I gave up thinking about "what I was going to create again" and started to wander aimlessly around the county every day. There was little difference between winter and spring in the Southwestern countryside; they both smelled like ashes. I walked along the concrete avenues that lacked restoration as the occasional motorbike or car flashed by. During the day, I would go shopping in the city or visit relatives in villages. Old people always sit in front of the village branch and chair. They just sit sporadically in their yards, waiting for the sun to dry chopped pickles and turnips. The farming season is idle in winter and early spring, everything is dead except for a few golden rapeseed flowers. The only thing that stays green is the cactus, which does not belong. This amazingly large and drought-tolerant American plant grows wildly in the messy fields of Pengxi.
I occasionally wandered far away. Sometimes I would run into houses that had been under construction for over ten years; sometimes I would see deserted buildings that were about to be demolished to make way for a road. Those huge buildings were built solidly on the land — only to disappear in a flash as people moved in with their families and out leaving their clothes behind just as instantaneously. Other times I would see foundations of bridges that were nearly completed along the brown and green pebble beach made of reinforced concrete.
When I went home in the evening, I would play video games and occasionally take out my notebook to write a diary entry. Although I was only jotting down or drawing bits and pieces that hold unspecified meaning, a certain feeling came back to me. I felt like a poet --- or more arrogantly, an artist! This vainglorious feeling and the sticky rice balls made by my grandma gave me immense comfort. Not doing anything for anyone, I was able to stay by my own side again. I took a pencil and sketched furiously and sporadically some beautiful sentence excerpts. I used the printer to print out some photos I'd taken and put them on the wall with other found objects, and my self seemed to have come back.
When I went back to town to sort out the photos I had taken in the county, I suddenly had a passion to do something again. I tried to sort out some of the fiction and photography I had created and make a concept out of it, but it was almost impossible to assemble all emotions into one project. When I consulted my photographer Yuhan, he commented that my body of work was diversified in media but integrated in spirit, and the concept jumped off the page.
I'd been contemplating for a long time: what is all this? All my emotions — what is it that I want to express? Where do they come from? Where will they sprout? At the end of the day, as I’m writing this, I don't even have the answer. But what I do know is that this piece is a different kind of journey in my life, and I think of it as a healing one without a beginning or an end.
Unlike a continuous state of “moving forward,” this journey happened while I was staying stagnant, or more so “lying down”: lying on the brownish-red boundless earth.
The winds from the motorbike pass by, wrapped in diesel exhaust and particles of burnt-out ash from the marmalade, and I am in a daze. The music of an unnamed horn flows in from far away. The sensation of flesh being lifted by sturdy harvested stems in the field. I lie there until I want to get up.
