Destruction is cleansing
Destruction is cleansing
In the burning pain, we find clarity and creation, a quiet promise of enlightenment, an unyielding wisdom waiting beneath the ashes.
In the burning pain, we find clarity and creation, a quiet promise of enlightenment, an unyielding wisdom waiting beneath the ashes.
In a deserted factory in Jingdezhen, known as the 'porcelain capital' and located in southeastern China, an artist draped himself in the earth's fabric. He enveloped himself in clay and stood as though he were an incarnation of a pottery figurine. Passersby applied the clay mud onto his body, meticulously covering every inch, and wound him in a sheaf of firecrackers. Once the preparations were complete, the firecrackers were lit. Amidst the crackling din of the exploding firecrackers, the clay was fired, transforming the artist into a living pottery sculpture.
The entire process looked like a celebration, akin to the way people associate firecrackers with New Year festivities, yet it also resembled a sacrificial ritual. Much like how people bid farewell to the old year with firecrackers and welcome the hope and new days ahead, the artist sacrificed his external shell to expose a core that's wide awake, lucid, and eternal.
This is an art performance titled 'Explosion is a Self-Redemption' (爆炸是一场自我救赎), curated in an international performance art festival called '儕chái' by artist Dayu Yu. ('儕chái' means 'peers', or 'people of the similar kinds;). You can watch the entire performance, including the preparations, in the video below, which is exhibited at a gallery in Jingdezhen.
Across cultures, fire holds a profound and often sacred significance in ancient mythologies, signifying fire as a messenger of enlightenment, creation of the world, and purifier of the soul.
If there is no other way out, no other way to express extreme emotions purely, just burn it down. We will discover empathy and resonance underneath the ashes. Like fire burns everything, it purifies everything.
I recently came across the artworks of Xiang Hao that deeply impressed me, in which he left burnt marks from the fire on the canvas. In his pieces, he employed fire as an artist's tool, scorching the canvas with deliberate intent. This is among the few wall arts where I see artists directly using fire as a tool of the creative process — to paint with fire and leave behind the remnants as evidence of their transient existence.
Xiang Hao's pieces were displayed at the SunS Living gallery, a hidden gem in a Hutong in Beijing.
In those strong mono-color canvas work, contour lines signify the border of our world, the boundary of the uncertain flow is powered by random movement of paint, and is “fixed” after the artist lights the fire. In the very delicate and uncontrollable works on paper series called “Traces“, the artists tries to inch forward the limit between burning and losing control. limit between burning and disorder.
I do not like holding on to the irremediable. I think it's probably OK to burn it down, show the vulnerabilities, and sacrifice our desire to the burning pain of fire.
We connect more via pain rather than happiness --- the spirit under the flesh will find its way out, via the common rituals of the burnings and destruction.
In the burning pain, we find clarity and creation, a quiet promise of enlightenment, an unyielding wisdom waiting beneath the ashes.
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