Rabbit on the Run was the title of my solo exhibition held in 2018 at the Beijing Minsheng Art Museum. This exhibition presented a small number of artworks, but each artwork was massive. Aside from paintings, I also created my first large-scale wooden sculpture. In these artworks, I created a new image: a black rabbit with a texture seemingly chopped out with an ax, a symbolic rabbit.
After that, I was constantly asked, why a rabbit? To trace the roots of this imagery, we must first go back to a foreign novel I read in the 1990s. Compared to my high school days, when people waited in line for passed-down copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude, by the 1990s, all kinds of foreign books were available in every major bookstore. This included the trilogy by American author John Updike: Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; and Rabbit is Rich. I liked reading novels back then, and bought quite a few. These three novels left a clear and lasting impression on me. They trace out three stages in the life of a man named Harry: as a youth, he wanders adrift, running at the first sign of trouble; later, he comes into some money, and returns home a rich man; finally, after attempting to settle down for his remaining years, he finds himself on the run once again… I see the life of Harry as a microcosm of the fate of the common people: the rebelliousness of youth, the compromises of middle age, and the final stretch to the end, a constant struggle between flight and return. The many desires and challenges that emerge across this process are the inevitable encounters of human life.
In the long progression of human history, many large, ferocious animal species were wiped out, but the seemingly frail little rabbit has been able to endlessly proliferate. As a group, rabbits are a tenacious lot, while the individual seems utterly defenseless. In the wild, the individual rabbit's survival depends on its legs being long enough and fast enough to allow for escape. Do we not spend most of our own lives in a state of exhausted flight? Is our time not filled with moments of frailty and desperation? Harry, the novel's protagonist, is nicknamed "Rabbit". His actions do highly resemble a harmless, frightened rabbit, spending his days fleeing for his life. In this way, certain traits of humans and rabbits began to overlap in my mind.
As humans, we of course have ample reason to be proud of the achievements of our civilization. We have pushed forward rapidly along the path of evolution to this point: rockets and satellites can reach outer space, people can easily communicate by video across thousands of miles, we can sit around and summon food deliveries with our phones, robots are replacing humans in more and more tasks, and even kitty litter boxes can clean themselves… We enjoy the satisfaction of great material plenty, experiencing everything at an accelerated pace. This development indeed embodies humanity's collective wisdom and extraordinary creativity, to the point that sometimes we really do believe there's nothing we can't do. Why, then, are our individual paths in life beset by so many difficulties? We are surrounded by people just like us, so why do we feel so profoundly alone? Why do we have a deeply hidden world that emerges in the depths of night, showing us the things we desire but cannot have, showing us love turned into hate, showing us wounded hearts and tears, showing us constant cycles of brutality and the deaths of innocents, showing us our weak and lowly sides? The existence of this intangible world is a constant reminder that we must face an inescapable fate: the majority of lives are lived like ants, constantly busy and unable to find meaning in life. How could this not leave us at a loss? Humans are animals that need meaning. This is humanity's noble spirit. That is why tragic fates are always lurking like shadows… The rabbit is me, and it is us…
The sudden emergence of the rabbit in 2017, while I was preparing works for this solo exhibition, was somewhat connected to the novels, but was more of a reflection of my mental state at that time. Previously a perennial optimist, I sank into a state of anxiety and sorrow. Perhaps it was because some of my tenets of faith fell apart, or perhaps it was my disappointment and indignation at certain human behaviors, or even doubts about myself. In any case, there was a powerful sense of helplessness I had never felt before. I was plagued by my own problems and the disasters regularly unfolding in the world. When these sentiments encountered Beuys' outlook on nature, and joined with the image of a black rabbit that had already emerged in my Object Language series, the highly symbolic rabbit emerged.
First came the five-ton, double-sided camphor wood sculpture Taking Form. It frightened people to see it towering above the concrete floors of the museum like the ruins of an ancient city. Its height compels the gaze upwards. On one side is a rabbit embracing a person, while the other side is a person embracing a rabbit. The interchange between the two subjects gives the work a mystical, millenarian power. The body is filled with ax cuts and cracks, heightening the tragic tension. The camphor wood used in the sculpture is enormous. This wood was highly prized in ancient times for its dense grain, which resulted in a sturdy, long-lasting material. Due to the insect-repelling properties of its aroma, this wood was often used to make wardrobes. In China's southern coastal regions, camphor is also often used for Buddhist statues. For this reason, when people saw me using such precious wood to make such a rough sculpture at that huge size, they were astonished. Some even said it was an act of ignorance or delusion. The fresh-hewn wood emits a strong, striking odor that filled every corner of the exhibition space, permeating the bodies and olfactory senses of the visitors, eventually being brought along with them when they left.
The series of large-format paintings— How to Explain What Has Happened to the Deceased , 21-Yesterday's Glory , 21-The Present Situation , Ten Gourmands , and Black Rabbits Always on the Run —emerged from three eternal questions: "Where do we come from? Where are we now? Where are we going?" Amidst these questions, I attempt to reveal the past and present of the world in which we live, and my imagination of its future. The blue and green tones of 21-Yesterday's Glory inspire us to indulge in the splendor of past civilizations. The rabbit is like a tour guide, appearing alongside the most representative landmarks of 21 countries, including the most sacred and elegant churches, plazas, towers, streets, and monuments, awe-inspiring symbols of the heights of humanity's wisdom and beauty. The arrangement of 21 national flags in the same position, titled 21-The Present Situation appears with a red base tone filled with black and gray points, revealing an obviously tense atmosphere, while the relative positions of the nations allude to unique relationships between them. Looking back at these paintings seven years later, they seem to have foretold the turmoil and disorder we see today. Ten Gourmands is a metaphor for humanity's unharmonious relationship with nature. Humanity's plunder of natural resources has led to the early extinction of many animal species. As the people celebrate with drinks, the plates in front of them are already empty. How to Explain What Has Happened to the Deceased is a giant quadriptych that lays out a prophecy along chronological lines: the gods have fallen, human subjectivity has been asserted, the contradictions between humanity and nature grow increasingly severe, and future humanity is wiped out by robots of their own creation. As the paint flows downward, four images seem to gradually emerge from behind the scenes, slowly taking form.
These groups of paintings carry on with the approach of the Object Language series, continuing the mishmash of languages: concrete subject forms against abstractly rendered backgrounds, the appropriation of existing images (pictures of sculptures and performance pieces), the juxtaposition of multiple pictures, and interventions with different materials. The arrangement of twenty-one pictures causes the vanishing point of traditional painting to disappear, with the sequential arrangement of pictures like a string of twenty-one similar but not identical sentences, the tone increasingly heightened by the endless repetition, the semantic meaning magnified and expanded. Paint, spatter, scatter, drip, scrape, brush, various techniques are employed freely within an overall field of dynamic energy.
The rabbit occupies the core of the works I have created over the past seven years. These artworks explore human desires and the contradictions brought into the world because of them: between the individual and collective will, between the urban and natural environments, and in the complex emotions between them. The artworks comprise different, even opposing forces in contention. The heavy colors release fervent passions and nocturnal urges. There is some continuity with my early works in terms of the forcefulness and speed of the brushwork, but the ubiquitous fluidity has added a sense of relaxation and flow. Owing to all of these elements, these are no longer static works but a series of energy fields. The concrete and complex depictions of people and scenes from my past paintings have now been transformed to highly characterized, almost iconified images. Though the concrete form remains, its aim is no longer the expression of truth. It is now simply to construct the form of existence with the most symbolic import.
At this time on this world, life and its related forms of existence are in a state of rapid transformation. The embodiment of the changes and their perceptions have always been the focus of my attention and expression. In this sense, I have always maintained the identity of a documentarian. The recent Inside/Outside is a continuing painting series. The works appear to present interior and exterior visual space, but the implications are numerous. The series expresses divisions in physical space, but also alludes to the psychological barriers between people, represented by rabbits, and the environment in which they live. The complex, ever-changing world envelopes us like a kaleidoscope as we constantly scroll through our phones, as if the world is already in our hands. As I see it, however, the leaps in material and technology have not made us any wiser, open, or compassionate in our deeds or spirits. In the quest for a more perfect life, modern people rush through their phones with ever-increasing urgency. The rabbit sealed inside may be trapped within, or perhaps it is enjoying its own unique inner world, enjoying a moment of contentment with a cup of coffee or a pastry.
In 2019, I created a set of wooden rabbit sculptures wearing facemasks with holes carved out of their chests. Some had fear in their eyes, while others only numbness, and yet others had completely vacant eyes. Clearly, the empty hearted rabbit is a mirror reflecting a portrait of the brutal reality and our complex sentiments. This image was once again ahead of its time. Now, some people have grown accustomed to wearing masks whenever they step outside, and everyone has picked up the new habit of standing one meter apart… After experiencing fear and trauma for so long, we need time to cast out the dark clouds in our hearts.
The decision to make sculptures came naturally to me. In my 2011 solo exhibition Be Memorized at the National Art Museum of China, I used a series of mixed media methods: notes collected from common people through field research; the combination of original performances and classic documentary film to create a new film; nearly one hundred old television sets collected over a period of five years used as readymades. These writings, images, and objects were combined to build two giant tunnel corridors through time and space in the museum. As people walked down these corridors, their memories were pulled back into the past. Meanwhile, the twenty-two paintings on the walls were like recollections from that memory space. After that exhibition, it was as if all of the doors in my mind were flung open. I know that now I could freely choose whatever materials and forms I wanted to create my artworks. I began adding mixed materials such as lace fabric, tissue paper, metal, and cement to my paintings, things which appear in my creations across different periods. Whenever I felt something was needed at the moment, it became the perfect choice. This is hard to explain. When you make a choice that feels really good in the moment, it always ends up just right.
In my studio in 2020, I also crafted nearly one hundred ambiguous forms. Most of them were chimeras with missing limbs and multiple heads, mutated animals or other organisms. This is my imagining of the profound crisis humanity itself will face in the world of the future. I selected some of these to enlarge in bronze. When presenting them at my 2021 solo exhibition Beyond the Rules, I began using the possibilities provided by different spaces to rearrange them into sculptural groups, sometimes adding supplementary materials such as sand, tinted acrylic, or textiles. As the spaces shifted, these sculptures took on different connotations. In numerous exhibitions that followed, I also employed presentations that closely aligned with the space, turning these once solitary, static objects into a theatrical creation. The spatial morphology of each exhibition became a new element incorporated into the work. This experience of constant renewal keeps me in a state of excitement.
In my latest works, I have intentionally reduced the complexity of the modeling, while consciously drawing from certain resonances in calligraphy for the outlines and emphasizing wholeness in colors. Meanwhile, I have maintained the tension of contradiction and the viscosity of the colors. Explaining one's own artistic creations is a difficult task. The accord reached between the activities of the artist's inner mind and their artworks is an act of rendering an invisible world in form, that form itself being a vision of formless chaos. Between the artwork and seeing stands an act of inference beset by misunderstanding, one which is very difficult to describe in language. In our present day, flooded with images due to the proliferation of visual technologies, painting appears simple and unsophisticated due to its ancientness, while wood and aluminum give off a primitive feel, but these materials are imbued with primal energy and warmth. In this day and age, the selection of material is like the expression of an attitude. The rabbit is a metaphor and symbol for humanity, an accumulation of complex perceptions. It is neither a conceptual release nor a linguistic game. It is the symbolic expression of heaviness and lightness, absurdity and banality, the fleeting and the eternal.
What is gain and loss? Why is there joy and suffering? Why are our lives constantly cycling between comedy and tragedy? I fear that reality holds no answers. Thus the rabbits must continue to run…