Who are Who

by Qiu Minye

 

How much humanity is lost in times? When we talk about shortage, what are we talking about? There is no absolute happiness, nor absolute hardship; what else can we possess then? How can this moment turn into eternity？What can be solved by leaving oneself behind?...

 

Peach branches. Cantonese legend has it that if you bring a peach tree home the eve of Chinese New Year, put red packets with new cash bills inside on the branches, then, with the tree in full blossom during the Chinese New Year, it will bring you good luck in the new year to come. But when the Chinese New Year is over, all will be put aside and life will resume the routine. The peach branches, with flowers still blooming, will be deserted and can be seen in trash cans along the streets. Every year is the same. In the pictures many animals are made with deserted peach branches.

 

It’s a series of works about the truth inside us, yet also works of realism.

 

Always there are two worlds, otherwise the world must have been long collapsed. People are passing away in the realistic world, while coming back to life in the poetic one. Those who can travel through the two worlds freely make us envious.

 

There are eighteen people in “Who Are Who”; they are one person.

 

Standing on big, big wilderness that never existed before, this person has nothing to lean on in front or behind himself, without gods above or underneath. In a land like this, all he could do is to have a carnival with himself, the must be way to exist.

 

Clumsiness is a spirit, an experience, also life itself. No blind faith in ideas or times; rather, reproduce life with life in flesh. Hence, in “Who Are Who” you will see clumsiness in a pair of real human hands in flesh to produce, based on their own imaginations, ghosts.

Ridiculous ghosts, possibly, are not the product of anger; it’s more like the result of facing up what is reality, what is now. There is only one kind of heroism, which is, finding out what the world is really is and still loving it.

 

In “Who Are Who”, there are two ducks, three monkeys, four chickens, eight parrots, eight pigeons, one horse, one fish, one ostrich, three geese, one turtles, two crows, three preserved fish, one cat, three golden fish, one big fish, one long-legged animal. They are part of the nature, hence part of the human being.

 

The lost feelings of life are not lost really; they’ve been placed at somewhere not easy to notice.

 

Serenity is a horse. Riding it all the way toward the new horizons, everything is growing, and I am growing too. This is my ultimate longing.

 

翻译：王尔山

Translation: Wang Ershan