Emotions arise without our knowledge, (情不知所起)

deepen with each step,(一往而深)

for the living can experience death, (生者可以死)

and the dead can come back to life. (死可以生)

If there is no possibility for the living to be united with the dead, (生而不可與死)

and for the dead to be reborn, (死而不可復生)

then it is not the utmost depth of emotions. (皆非情之至也)

---Tang Xianzu

The inverse of love is not hate, not counter-love. The inverse of love is not love. Where should love end? Does love have an end?

Every moment I feel that my love is about to end, it always resurfaces in another place. I am imprisoned here between life and death, swimming on the edge. The moment love dies in my life, it is instantly resurrected in my writing, but my writing still ends. The scenarios and dialogues spawned by love are inevitably decaying, and love breaks out of its black-and-white frame again. Love still doesn't end. Love just disappears into the tip of my pen, and in an ineffable gesture of infinity, pronounces the end of my going to write.

When I first started to experiment with painting, I continued to think in terms of writing. I wanted to tell a story, or at least a scenario. As expected, I failed. My tutor looked at my painting and said to me, "Your painting can't be called a painting yet, it's just an illustration”. So I realised that for painting, the content is secondary, or even that for contemporary painting, the content is completely unimportant. Feelings are important for painting.

"There are two ways of going beyond figuration (that is, beyond both the illustrative and the figurative): either toward abstract form or toward the Figure. Cezanne gave a simple name to this way of the Figure: sensation. The Figure is the sensible form related to a sensation; it acts immediately upon the nervous system, which is of the flesh, whereas abstract form is addressed to the head, and acts through the intermediary of the brain, which is closer to the bone."

For this reason, I have returned to my texts from the point of view of sensation rather than content, and sensation is like some kind of aetheric substance, diffused in the text in an invisible way, only revealing itself in some metaphors, and at the same time reinforcing the strength of the metaphors with itself.

In the process of intermediality, there exists an eternal way of speaking in which the living can experience death and the dead can come back to life. Writing stops, painting begins, painting stops, writing begins again. This eternity exists in intermediality and dies at the end of the desire to speak. Until The end of the affair, until the speaker's despairing lament: "O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.”

---Xuanru Wang 2024