Title: “Don't tell anyone anything. If you do, you'll start missing everyone.”

——Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye

by Chen Haiyan

In history, unknown soldiers and emperors and nobles hoped to “live in Suzhou and Hangzhou, die and be buried in Mangshan”.The tombs became so crowded in Mangshan that there left little place for cows to lie down. There is an old saying in Luoyang: Somebody is watching the wheat in Mangshan. That means he is dead and buried in the wheat field there. The place gathers all souls no matter they are wisdom or fool. History is a collection of death, the deviation between writing and image, the struggle between justice and evil, the choice between forgetting and remembering, but it is nothing more than a elegy nourished by imagination for life and death, love and hatred.

In 2005, Luo Yongjin's exploration started to focus on different artificial structures above  the earth, including various tombs. He has been doing this for nearly 20 years waiting for the right time. As time goes by, relatives and friends pass away including his beloved pet. The past is gone, the future has not arrived and the present is empty. Life is unpredictable.

The once vivid old photos from family albums, the silent resting places and the fragments of place and time, are awkwardly juxtaposed together and put into the old frames. In a lonely afternoon with never ending cicada chirps, the synchronic illusion of photos projects, frame after frame , the artist's subjective imagination of space and history and silently develops the four-dimensional narrative into a miniature plane, minimizing complex experiences, castrating sympathy, diluting emotions, and making all realms empty. The practice of de aestheticizing asceticism has a fragile relationship with the viewer's perception, just like a photo album leafed through by a wandering attention. The farce of fame, fortune, power, life and death is raging in the world, and even the nightingales have no desire to sing. Or perhaps among the magnificent imperial tombs, only the broken stone carvings of Weng Zhong on the spiritual path, seeing the divine light of time, dare to calmly shatter all the delusional phantoms with an ice axe. In the wild, we live and die and disappear silently.

Luo Yongjin imagines to relocate the exhibition to a building in the center of a vast wheat field, witnessing the whole life of wheat and completing a temporal and spatial narrative. Art, as an experiential transformation, can squander the blue skies and white clouds.The small building hanging alone in the rolling wheat waves. The door opens and the inside is empty. In the silence, the old mirror frames on the dim wall shimmer with golden light, enlightening the eternal moment from the depth of gelatin silver prints. Actually, they are the catchers in the rye.

Shanghai

August,2024