Introduction:
I’ve practiced drawing for a long time. When I was six, I would practice by doing three portraits every day, seven days a week. As I got older I was very good at drawing: I would still do three portraits every day, but I would also draw other things, and I could draw faster and faster. I wanted to be accepted into China’s Academy of Art, which is very difficult, so I went to an art high school to draw, and in the afternoon I stayed at school to keep drawing, and then I went home to draw more. And I’ve never really stopped drawing.
I am also someone who feels emotions very, very strongly. Drawing became both a kind of stress, a trigger and cause for many of my hurt emotions (as I pushed myself, and was pushed by my environment and society, to be better and better), and a tool for stepping inside my emotions and experiencing them. A tool for trying to heal.
Over the last few years, I’ve become increasingly engaged with abstract drawing as a way of entering into, moving through, living inside, and moving out from emotions. I’ve designed curriculum activities for people to start practicing emotional abstract drawing. I’ve used emotional abstract drawing to take notes in grad seminars, mixing a record of how I’m feeling with a visual record of the conversation. Part of my drawing might stand in for the fear I’m feeling, and the boxes and containers of safety that I’m trying to arrange around my fear. Part of my drawing might also include the patterns from a colleague’s shirt, the arrangement of our chairs in a grad seminar, and the arrangement of ideas in an academic article. In this way, each picture was a kind of meeting place where I could draw what I was hearing, what I was thinking about, what I was learning, what I was feeling, what I was hurt by, and what I didn’t understand yet. My friend Azlan Smith started sitting next to me, and drawing along with me. We didn’t talk about it much, but we shared the practice.
The pictures in this chapter show some of my emotional abstract drawings and my abstract ceramics.
I still have not drawn—or described in words—my 思念. But through my drawings, my ceramics, my poems, my friendships, my watching and listening to my environment, I am getting closer to my 思念 and to the 呼吸 that is life.
Three Poems To My Monster
思念
我不明白我 我不明白我的怪物的机制 也不明白它的用途
它好像就一直在那里 观望 蓄意着什么 让我总是不确定 也有一丝丝的不安
它在做什么 它怎样生活 它何时睡觉何时休息 它需要睡觉休息么？
我也在观察着它 但是迷雾太重看不清 拨开了又被遮起来
好多好多层啊 难难难
“Missing”
I don’t understand who it is, this 怪物 [Guàiwù] inside me.
I don’t understand myself because I don’t understand how my 怪物
eats, mouth in my mouth
sleeps, head on my pillow
cooks, spatula in its claw
I have been trying to draw my 怪物, but I haven’t figured out what it looks like
and it changes all the time. I know it has many arms
legs like a bug’s legs
a hard skin.
What does it do, how does it live, why does it grow, and when does it need to rest?
I’m not smart enough to understand myself.
I’m not smart enough to understand why I can’t understand myself.
I want to see it, but the fog is too thick to see clearly.
It’s pushed away again
covered again
so many layers, hard, hard.
Translation note: 怪物 means something strange, something scary, something not normal and unacceptable by “normal” people. The characters are literally 怪 (“strange”) 物 (“thing”). It might be translated as “monster,” though there are layers to the word. 怪 is also used in 怪异, which describes something not connected to daily life—an alien, or a ghost, or the sky suddenly turning bright green. 物 is also used in 物体, which means object—anything from a pen to an orange to a rock to a severed hand. So a 怪物 might literally be when a piece of the physical world 物体 becomes very strange 怪异.
象
它是什么
如象一般藏在里面
象存在于世间
它又或许不存在于世间
世间是什么
认知之下
个人之上
它是什么
暂且是个怪物吧
“象”
I can be a 象 even in my body.
I feel inside me a core, a nucleus,
abstract but solid.
Can we imagine
something that we have not
been shown?
Maybe I think
my 怪物 is a 怪物 because of television
(creatures with tentacles) and movies
(beasts with teeth) and maybe
my 怪物 is actually a tree or a fairy
or a cliff.
I do not believe what we see,
what we learn, what we know
about the world. What is the world?
We created God with a human body.
I know there is something beyond the human body.
Sometimes the 象 core of me looks like
grass
or looks like
sand
but it only looks like
grass
and it only looks like
sand
so I cannot use the metaphor
to explain the 象 of what truly is.
Translation note: 象 means something like “projection,” or “image”—if a projector puts a picture on a screen, 象 means that picture, that construction of light and form. 象征 can also mean “stand for” or “symbolize,” like a flag for a country or the word “apple” for an actual physical apple. 象 can also mean “elephant.” I don’t know why. My language is a funny, tricky, playful 怪物.
呼唤
我一直在呼唤
呼唤雨雪
呼唤甜腻
呼唤红痕
呼唤沉静
它是怎样的存在？
它于此诞生 更加复杂与稳定
它融合了情绪 暗影于是作为外壳显现出来
然而 暗影下又潜藏了什么
随着它不断长大 我好像看到了一点迹象 却无法确认
差什么 一根针
针也不见得能刺穿它 于是流出了液状的迷雾 徒增疑惑
我在等 焦急的等着
我难过 我难受 我忍了太久太久
我期待 它的成熟 某一刻出现在我面前
我会拥抱它 义无反顾的亲吻它
我会对它说 亲爱的 你可曾知道我是多么的思念你啊
”Calling”
I keep calling—
calling for rain and snow
difficulties, parables
calling for sweet
a partner’s warm eyes
calling for the red mark
scratched on my body
calling for the silence
of my attitude. So often I live in silence.
How does it exist, my 怪物?
It was born from my calling, my voice and lips and breath
but it is more stable and complex than my breath and lips and voice.
When I draw my emotions I draw purple, brown, black,
and when I draw my 怪物 my 怪物 grows a shell, purple, brown, black.
A shadow. I wonder what is inside.
Inside my 怪物 is changing and growing.
Sometimes I can see it growing, grassroots into earth
or tumor into bone.
If I want to see what is inside the shell
maybe I need a needle
but I’m not sure if a needle can go through the shell,
and even if it can, maybe the needle’s hole will only let out
mist, flowing, swirling, covering up more doubts.
I’m waiting to see what my 怪物 is.
I don’t know how long I’ll have to wait. Sometimes
I’m very sad. Sometimes happiness
stops my breath. Maybe my 怪物 is a sweet fruit,
a plum, red, pink, purple, and one day when it’s ripe and full
I’ll say
here is what you are
I’ll see
this is what you look like
I’ll hug my 怪物 and kiss it without hesitation
and call
you don’t know much I’ve wanted to see you
and call
lovely do you ever know how much I miss you.
Translation note: 呼唤 might be translated as “calling.” One of my friends, Natalia, told me once that when you want to relax you can exhale a soft sound from your body.
“Hooo.”
The character 呼 alone might be that relaxed sound, that “hoo,” when things are done or when you’re letting things go. This character is also used in 呼吸, which means breath, and in 呼吸器, which means a rebreather—like what someone uses when scuba diving or what a medical team might use in a hospital.
The second character 唤 is also used in 召唤, which is a way of asking someone to pay attention. If young kids are out of the house playing, and parents want the kids to come back for dinner time, 召唤 is that action of calling the kids back in.
So 呼唤—the kind of calling I mean—is something about breath, about the relaxation of letting your breath spill out from your lips, about the moment of connection and even tension when you call someone (or yourself) back in.