Hangzhou, the city where I live, is known for its mountains and water. The city has been praised throughout history as ‘its West Lake surrounded on three sides by soaring mountains with one side open to the City’. The lake is gentle and elegant, but we also have a roaring tidal bore on the Qiangtang, while other rivers run in all directions, creating Jiangnan’s famous scenery, typified as ‘water within the city and city within the water’. When I was young, our family lived on the Grand Canal, and we saw fishing boats from the countryside moored up nearby. I loved watching people catching fish, and I was sometimes invited onboard to play with the fishermen. Once I had so much fun I fell overboard and had to be rescued. It seems I have been inseparable from water since then.      

         Mountains and water – those blessings of nature – have long been my inspiring sorces. I already produced a work related to water when at college, Rain (2001), inspired by an illustration of precipitation in science book. How can I express the falling of raindrops in the materiality of stone? This question led me to manipulate images digitally. Raindrops fall one by one, gathering and scattering as if in a cycle, or like reincarnations of life and death. By taking the exact moment a raindrop falls and making this solid, my sculpture fixes time and emotion, as with magnetic discs, inducing thought and resonance.      

         Using rough granite to express the elegance and peace of water is the challenge of fusing two extremes within one medium. This entails a strong visual contrast. In traditional Chinese culture, water symbolises the principle of yin and softness, while stone symbolises yang and hardness. One of the rich insights of Daoism is that ‘hardness and softness compensate for each other’. Water, as the extremity of softness, moistens all things. Its benefits are inexhaustible, its uses unlimited. Yet ‘too extreme a softness can lead to hardness’. This is how my imagery of ‘water’ has arisen.      

         The unification of humanity with nature, or art with life, are goals I consistently work towards in all my creative acts. As the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzhi stated, ‘all things are equal in existence to myself ’. Such celestial coalescence is a central proposition in Chinese philosophy, and is the highest aspiration of East Asian aesthetics. Although I am still only in the process of exploring East Asian aesthetics and contemporary art, I hope to convey such thinking to viewers, and this motivates my entire creative practice. By and large, my art is allegorical, and strong or exaggerated forms are not its main features. By chance, this coincides with traditional East Asian philosophy and aesthetics. I too address apparent oppositions like wide and narrow, collection and distribution, imaginary and real, sparse and dense, complex and simple, dynamic and static, hard and soft, curved and straight, concave and convex, black and white, deep and pale, fresh and mature, instantaneous understanding and gradual learning. With this in mind, one can achieve a complete observation of the world and experience of all things.      

         Through my Water series I hope to communicate the serene, liberated and plain state of Chan (or Zen in the better-known Japanese pronunciation). I trust viewers will sense a hint of this philosophical meditation in my work, and that this will bring their exhausted and constricted minds to some sense of ease, comfort and joy.