The wind knows its own path—the "colorless realm" print I want

▲ "Source" Art micro-spray

▲ "Reading" etched copper plate

▲ "Ancient" etched copper plate

▲ "A Brief History of Time" etched copper plate

▲ "Water" letterpress

▲ "Xiang No V" etched copper plate

▲ "Dream Yoga - Xiang" etched copper plate

□ Ma Jun

Anyone who sees my prints for the first time will be deeply attracted by his novel, strange, grotesque, and magical visual shapes. With the wonderful increase and improvement of a series of sensations such as curiosity, surprise, confusion, excitement, and fascination, we enter into a deep experience, which I call "ecstasy" in a Chinese cultural context that indicates extreme intoxication or confusion.

It is very different from our previous experience of viewing paintings: the paintings we usually see, in most cases, we can relatively easily use knowledge and experience to interpret the meaning of the paintings, and even see the names. Because they belong to something that we are familiar with in the world of everyday experience. When looking at the paintings I want, the well rope that most viewers experience is no longer enough to penetrate the meaning of his visual shape. The world of shape he presents is in many cases too far away from our world of experience and worldly life, as far as the depths of the cosmic world and the earth, as far as the vast and surging depths of consciousness. This leads to our deep experiences being both engaged and hindered, challenged by cognitive limitations. And it is this provocation that both welcomes and rejects, which precisely inspires our admiration for his artwork.

To make the work difficult and complex, it is not that as a painter I want to be mysterious or sophisticated there, nor is he insisting on a strange journey on the printing paper. The root cause of this result comes from his artistic concepts that have long been internalized.

The artistic genes I want are inseparable from a Tibetan village called Bundaka. He took all the nourishment that that land gave him, and transformed his spirituality, perception, and mysterious experience from the vast and profound depths of the polar world into the endless thousands of shapes in his printmaking world. In his artistic context, printmaking is a spiritual universe that awakens the memory of life, integrates alaya consciousness, and accepts the care of all things. His paintings are both magnificent and whimsical, but also subtle and profound, and solemn. In his diligent "philosophy of modeling", he melted the principle of all things taking care of each other like blood into his visual composition, into the traces left by each brush and copperplate etching. Tibetans also have an innate philosophical concept called "Danzhi." "Dan" means "support, foundation", "wisdom" means "dependence, conditionality", and together, it means that everything is interconnected and dependent on each other.

He has another philosophy that profoundly influences his styling. This concept is also hidden behind his style. Here, I would like to borrow the concept of "life memory" expressed by Japanese graphic design master Yasuhira Sugiura to reflect and bypass:

It does not stop at the personal experience of life, but is closely connected with the older things that the parents gave and even the power of the ancient ancestors. Moreover, each cell and the DNA contained in it are also clearly engraved with the historical record of this life that has lasted for billions of years.

That is, up to the level of the cell and the nucleus, the abundant past time capsule forms the delicate tremor of all our existence and perception, reason. This is called "life memory."

—— The First Edition of "The Birth of the Shape"

Yasuhira Sugiura's seemingly esoteric formulation of memory extends the tentacles of our consciousness to the biological sense of the brain's memory of things that have been old, and even the information stored in cells and nuclei. This meaning of his immediately reminded me of the 18th-century German Romantic poet Novalis, who once expressed in a poetic questioning tone the reflection of Yasuhira Sugiura: "Everyone is born from an ancient imperial tree, but how many people still have the imprint of this origin?" This formulation, when examined from the mode of experience that we are accustomed to, seeing as believing, and with calm objectivity, seems to be painted with a strong fantasy of mysticism. Qian Zhongshu said: "Mysticism is of course very close to great egoism; but great egoism annexes the universe, and mysticism wants to absorb the universe – or rather, let the universe absorb it... Egoism destroys the universe with the circle becoming the self, and the anti-guest is the mainstay, while the mysticism destroys the self to round the universe, and the anti-lord is the guest. "It seems that mysticism leads to a high-dimensional space that transcends the self.

To this end, the prints I want will completely break the narrowness and singleness of traditional prints and modern prints in the expression of the theme, subject matter, and style types, and break through the usual sketch style of Chinese and foreign book stamp prints, as well as the personal mood of aestheticism. In the context of contemporary art, I want to let his printmaking world, in the presentation of visual shapes, unprecedentedly weave a lofty and vast cosmic artistic conception and a vast and subtle "colorless world" spectacle.

"Colorless world" is a term in Buddhism that refers to the immaterial world, that is, the spiritual world in the Buddhist context composed of the four elements of receiving, thinking, acting, and knowing. This Tibetan culture is full of Buddhist cosmological thinking orientation, which is not only the aesthetic cornerstone of the art world, but also the fundamental feature of its printmaking language. To put it a more simpler way, his plastic art, whether in terms of creative mechanism or stylistic characteristics, can be reduced to "the environment is born from the heart".

There are many ways and many angles to think about the prints and book tickets I want. Considering the diversity of his prints' types and subject matter, and considering the assessment of which aspects of his prints are most valuable and meaningful, I chose his Dream Yoga series.

The Dream Yoga series, as a particularly prominent and representative genre of wushu printmaking, is extremely refined in terms of expressive content and at the same time extremely broad, creatively combining the wandering-like dreams with the introspective cultivation belonging to the mystical realm. The difference with the contemporary Tibetan painters is that he did not choose the style of painting that directly expressed the real life and folk customs of Tibetan society, or that he deliberately alienated the visual scenes of secular life. He extends his aesthetic tentacles neither to the past nor to the social dimension of contemporary life, and he is more obsessed with the contemplation of the subconscious world. Jung was a scholar whom I would greatly admire and fascinate. In Jung, the search for inner imagery became the cornerstone of his psychology and his lifelong interest. The "inner image" is also like a mysterious stream, flowing in my heart and presenting itself as his visual shape. This is still a field of contemporary printmaking that no one has set foot in. I want to not only plunge headlong into this virgin land of stylistic performance, but also branded with psychologicalism everywhere.

From a psychological point of view, "dreams typically belong to the realm of symbols and myths", and the original and fundamental meaning of symbols is "to gather together". (Rollo May's "Courage to Create") As we have already said, his philosophy of modeling strongly reflects the concept of the reflection of all things, and also reflects the "Danzhi" thinking of tibetans everywhere. In the small picture, he brings together the starry sky, the earth, the mountains, the rivers, and the living beings, and weaves together the all-encompassing, bizarre and mysterious dreams of man, and weaves them with his delicate and exquisite curves to the extreme, reaching the vast and subtle artistic realm.

The printmaking texture of My Want is intuitively reflected in the coiled overlapping of countless fine curves and countless sand grains. Western printmakers such as Kent and Escher always like to use neat horizontal lines to express the hierarchy and depth of space when expressing the vast space of the sky and the earth (which is of course influenced by woodcuts, lithographs and other materials), and I want to use dense granular dots similar to the effects of stars and waves on Escher's lithographs to express the void, ethereal and vast space. One of the most fascinating features of his loose, dense dots is that they are never cramming and disorderly into the modeling space, they have all been carefully and thoughtfully designed by the painter. In the repetitive observations, the viewer will find that they are all "moving" along a looming curved trajectory. Extremely typical Buddha head statues such as "Xiang One" and "Harmony Four Rui", the hair texture of the spiral bun and the wood grain linden tree nested in the body part all faintly reveal a beautiful curved texture. In particular, in his book ticket "Element-Earth", on the left and right sides of the overprinted shape of the Buddha's head and the Ruyi Tree, as well as the upper part, a cyclone pattern is both wonderful and unpredictable. These cyclone patterns (appearing as gaseous organisms) not only imply the vibrant and flowing atmosphere of nature, but also subtly reflect the bucket, bow and mi fingerprints on the human hand with the nature of the life code. Such a wonderful and full of vitality of formal beauty, we have already had the experience of reaching the spirit of the rhinoceros on the coffin painting of Mawangdui in Hunan Province two thousand years ago.

I want to create a visual texture and tactile texture that are rare in the domestic printmaking industry. Compared with traditional prints and modern general prints, the former is just a two-dimensional space without a sense of volume, and the tactile effect is smooth and smooth. His prints, on the other hand, are somewhere between bas-relief and painting. Although his line drawing cannot rely on physical space to create a spatial effect, under the premise of relying on and using line drawing, he cleverly uses the mechanical function of the printmaker to press the pattern deeply into the surface of the paper through the pressure of the printmaker, and then form a clear pattern with concave and convex shapes. His printmaking pictures are mixed with the sense of touch in the vision, so that we will feel the three-dimensional sense of concealment with the help of the naked eye in front of his visual image, if we use the touch of our fingers, with the delicate indentation of order and rhythm, it will bring us a wonderful touch.

In the prints I want, the droplets, flowers, branches, birds, clouds that appear repeatedly on the picture in the form of repetitions... All prove that he is a painter with the "imprint of the origin of origin" and the cultural nostalgia in his head.

Qinghai Daily (April 8, 2022, 8th Edition: Supplement)