The most precious thing in this world, to me, is time. This sense of the scarcity of time might have come from my father, who used to cite to me a sentence form an ancient verse, “Don’t trust the fashionable outwear, but to save time when you are young”. This sense of preciousness was heightened when I suffered a coma from the accidental breathing from the gas and travelled half way to the underworld. I had the chance to feel the precariousness of life, the temporary stay of a mortal in the eternity. As a magician, time forces me to experience the meanings of the four seasons, the astounding transformations from mornings to the evenings, the mapping of the surface of this planet, the fateful blossom and withering of flowers, the decadence of life after it is invaded by worms. Life is magical and enchanting indeed. 逃避者 Escapee布面油画 200X200cm 2013
Experiencing Death
I had quite a few chances of facing death and found out that they were tests from the heaven. Approaching it but not really having it, I feel like being led into a miracle or a mirage, a weightless space, without sadness, lightness in the joy…all those breathes, heartthrobs, shadows are frozen into one moment. In my Zen moment, I sense I could go into that weightless space, ecstasy-like, the fountain of my artistic creativity. To go deep into myself, I need the stillness in the space, to sharpen my senses, to capture those twinkling inspirations and write them on the canvas. The meaning of my life comes this way. It has been more than a decade now since I had exercised my spiritual self in contemplation and psychological explorations, seeking the limit to my mind and body, with analysis, critique and transcendence. I have the kongfu to come to deep debates with comrades and face courageously up to misunderstandings. Only time will tell that life and art could be my greatest consolation in this world. I am grateful to know that I might be the lucky few to have the chance to taste the sublime emptiness on top of my struggles. Of course I am modest enough to know that the toughest thing is in fact to know myself in my life.王妃的葬礼 Princess’ Funeral 100×150cm 2011
We have to face the consumerist behaviors in exploiting the nature and the human self and the numb reliance on human instincts. We could not retrieve to other sources except to our belongings to credit cards and titles and twitters. We do not have time to even question the directions of our own pursuits, identities, and the paths of our own evolution. How can we possess properly? How to live to create new values not only for myself but also for all the others? With the transformation of our daily life by new media and technics, we hardly have time to be sad or happy. We need to go to the path of original thinking in order to find for ourselves the way to the future. But we do not have the time or proper speed to go into that spiritual engagement. For substituting for that enterprise, one easily goes into drinking and gambling to tests death as a challenge. I happened to have read A History of Addiction in the Past 5,000 Years to be prepared for these challenges，knowing fully that it is highly dependent of material support and emotional blackmailing. From then on, the only thing I could form an addiction to is art.灵魂之爱 Spiritual Love 100×150cm 2010
About 15 years ago, I tried the bungee jumping to experience the weightlessness and lightness. But it also occurred to me that to transgress limits could also develop into a greed. Just as the diving lovers seek to strike a balance within and self-identity in a limited reality, artists need to achieve this balance. As philosopher Schopenhauer points out, we are pendulums swinging between pain and boredom. Only yesterday, I learned that a kid of my friend strangled himself in finding a sense of existence in the extreme experiment about his lived experience, just like I did with the bungee jumping. I know I got the calm and strength after long struggles with my mind and spirit. As for the exercising my spirituality, I had to be like a surgeon in examining my thoughts and spiritual state all day every day. It needs to be cruel to reflect oneself, for we tend to escape facing such self-examination. Confucius’s warning has a reason for us: to reflect on oneself three times each day is a minimum must for anyone who aims to be a decent person. And also as Laotzu points out that to pursuit a cause too much for too long could go into madness and destruction. If robots and intelligent machines have a chance to control society based on their own consciousness, human beings could be a serious danger.轻微自闭症 Mild Autism 200×200cm 2013
Human beings are spiritual animals. Giving up self-control, their destiny could be in tatters. Searching through the cosmos, re-evaluating the 6,000 history of human survival, I tasted a sense of death. I am not a happy go lucky pessimist, if not an active optimist. Yesterday is gone, tomorrow is nowhere near, the sure thing is today that I can possess without any regret. Life is a process, with contingency as its real substance. The end of the Earth is not my concern, but life and souls could manage to have their own future. Life for me means acceptance of all and make the best use of all, as long as I can use art as an exit for the maddening greed locked in me. In everyday life, the wellbeing of people around me is an invaluable blessing, death, in such ethos, could be treated as a friend.
Between Life and Death
Tang, a scientist specialized in High Energy Physics in Chinese Academy of Art, had a huge influence on me since I was a teen. The experience of falling into a well and coming to know that there was no darkness but pinkness, taught me, at 5 years old, to explore more on the territory of human imaginary. Experimenting with western music and philosophy enriched my pursuit of art in the later years greatly. Art for me works form more as a way of presenting life as a cosmic force by plasticizing the existing figurative faces, to extend into the unknown dimensions of life as an infinite growing force. By studying psychology, I am more courageous to explore the experience of death in a very positive way, that is, to take it as a driving force,爱欲之火 Eros Fire 100×200cm 2009
I used to learn from senior doctors of Chinese medicine and great scholars of I-Ching (Change) to dialectize on the coming and going, life and death in the balancing book of a destiny and had witnessed the life for life swap scenarios rumored among the folks. The supposed exchange of life chances among strangers calmed me down a great deal. Life is supposed to be accidental, the contingency is the rule of the cosmos. But still my family keep the photos of my grandparents as a cult, as a way of respecting the lost family members, especially in the festivals and holidays. My father was married into the family of my maternal grandparents, and played as a son of their own until the death of the latter. My parents treat the memorial of the lost family members as a serious ritual and I used to take it as a duty to paint my grandparents in my works as a mourning in advance. It was cold in Hunan and was a definitely a tough job for the elderly to sit there for hours as models for me. Their noses started to run and their feet became numb and only after bathing their feet in hot water could they recover. I never regard my grandparents as gone. I just think that they are living in the countryside and could come to see me with fish and grapes grown in the family garden very soon. I need to record the way they go into sleep, the sweetness and stillness going along with it. Death is a temporary farewell, life and death should be in a cycle. That is the origin of my Life and Death series. Later I go to find more personalities for the series to stage the drama of the reward of the sudden and horrible death in the serenity after death. Life is a precarious thing, for that, it is an excellent medium for art to practice a cult. The potential impulse hidden in life is a subject for our metaphysical meditations on the way we are today. “Such is the Death Itself is a 15-year project depicting the going away of the loved ones, the ceasing of life of a new-born, the pass away of the old masters, of the geniuses in the past ages. It is a dialogues transcending time and space.心上人 Sweetheart 100×150cm 2009
Life returns to its origin, so needs the human nature. The come-back, as described by Voltaire, is the returning to being good like Louis XIV was nearing his death. Or, the image of death looks like what Wincklemann depicted about the stone image of the gods from ancient Greece: noble simplicity and silent grandeur.
The New-Born
The birth of my daughter Cherry was also a stunning discovery to me. The magnificent transformation on my body and the relay of life in the womb made each day a day of enlightenment. She came to this world passing through my body; this encounter has to be taken as a predestined grace from the divine. Life is no less than an advent, the eloquent excuse or forgiving and for re-creation. From the early education in my pregnancy to the time line of her birth, I regarded all these terms as an exchange between two lives. I wrote the Manuel to the Pregnant for her Mentality and Emotions at that time. It is literally a tour of two adults in enjoying the natural sights, concerts, the lively and warm human relations. We came to agreements on a lot of things relations. So much so, that we could already do handshakes when she was 9 months old. It was no less than a miracle for me to see her foot prints in my belly.打哈欠的樱桃 Yawning Cherry 100×150cm 2014
From being a girl to being a mother, the transition of the role was a passage in which an artist new the inner layers of herself. I sensed every step of a young life evolving into a big enforcement of life. I recorded her B-supersonic images as a base to paint the intensification of a life at its early stage. I planned to transplanted the event of life giving to the canvas in order to pay back to this gift from the nature. I could sense the throbs of life right at the core of life, and experience hardly explicable to male artists. Every move of the baby in the womb led to an impulse on me to paint, and inject my expression of life as an response. To have experienced the most cherished part of life on another person and feel its vulnerability and temporality at the same time, along with the mixed feeling of ecstasy and sadness at the same time. The paradoxical feeling was also a great test to my artistic handling of my own sense of eternity and mortality. To try to put these life forces on the canvas tests my own life force to its limits.吸吮 Suck 60×80cm 2013
When I was pregnant, a friend of mine asked her daughter to touch my tummy and said that it is good news from humanity, a gesture of respect to life. Man is small cosmos, the heaven is the big one, the harmony between the two has been the ideal of Chinese philosophers. A preach from a very old Indian religious teaching, as is the smallest, so is the greatest, has been my mantra. Professor Deepak Chopra from Duke University said that if we had to admit that each system has feedback circuits, dynamic balances and lasting self-organizations, then modern science is returning to the old wisdom: the brain is a cosmos and the cosmos is a super brain. Three Pound Universe ,written by Judith Hopper and her husband Dick Teresi regarded the cosmos as a three-pound brain, on the one side, the pallium, on the other side, the dark matter in the cosmos, meaning that the brain is a micro-cosmos, and the cosmos is a macro-brain. Nowadays, our reflection of life goes back to the age of Buddha. I used oil painting and ink and water to explore the inner connections between the cosmos and the human life, and quite lost in its comlexity. For that exploration, I ignored to learn to drive, even to remember the code of my bank account and have no idea of where is my mobile phone, or being unavailable on the phone and neglect emails. My family and especially my daughter has to learn to cater to my non-functionality.你干嘛呢 what are you doing 33.5×33cm 2014
Museums, Galleries, libraries and art fairs are my favorite. I bought so many books and so many catalogues that managers and cashiers would come to help me handle the stuff. In the past 20 years, I bought children books from France, Germany, Japan, Russia and other counties. They are reading materials not only for me ,but also for my daughter. Cherry loves books and has real interest in reciting Chinese ancient poems and play them with her grand parent. She is now 19 month old and has already read 300 books, and is able to recognize fifty kinds of animals, and can imitate the sounds of a few dozen of animals. It is a magic that when a child can use her organs to communicate with her parents, a magnetic energy field is formed. Children are gifts from the heaven and are tools of education for adults. We learn from them as much they us. How to raise such sibling gifted with cosmic wisdom could be a real challenge to me as a parent, at least as an equal challenge from art.父亲的手 Father's Hands 200X200cm 2013
Following the next page
Buddha as Eternity
Taoists tend to say that human body is a cosmos. And Buddhists love to say that there are thousands of worlds within a tiny piece of sand. I tried to open my mind to embrace western gods, Buddha and Christ at the same time. In reading the bibles and all other holy scripts, I convinced myself that these sayings are telling me the same old story: to urge us to love in a big way, the teachings and rules are used to regulate the behaviors of the believers. Scientists are still hammering on the explanation of the inner truth of the universe, not the revealing in advance of the secret of the cosmos, but the blindness resulted from greed and ignorance. In the 17th century, Leibnizargued that the supernatural things were possible and started to construct a theory of the material world. His discovery of calculus led to the Holographictheory 200 years later. A Korean scientist, Zhen Ren, writes in his Infinite Cosmos in a Particle, that monadology ensures the existence of a cosmos that is composed of numerous monads, in each of which exists a world.普世之光 Universal Light 100×100cm 2010
Two of my cousins, one in the area of high energy physics and the other in pathological studies enlightened me with their researches in my understandingof the cutting-edge scientific explorations and the complex structure of human brain. The encounters helped me to expand my experiments on new dimensions.
The first experiment on belief started with my mother. She planned to go the Buddhist temple on the Heng Shan Mountain and asked me to do a portrait for her. The painting drove me deep into the inner space of my mind. I developed from that trial into a series of captures of the Buddhist aura. It is easy to seek myself in its zigzag way, but hardly possible to seek the essence of Buddha in an image. Buddhism is a belief, and Buddha is the light itself. What I can try to do my best is my meditations in the spare time. My investment in this practice led me to communicate with a few comrades on belief and destiny. But there is Buddha even in our stubborn daily struggles. The only requirement from us is to respect and sacrifice for the least visible act. In our sensitive dealing with the matter of life and death, we are sure to meet Buddha in his face. Quiet meditations, quiet creation and quiet life now mean the same thing to me. 人不妄动 Move no Reckless 200×200cm 2010
Back to the Moment
Finding my own way back to the daily life is the only way of being out-of-the-worldly. What does this going back mean to a female artist? The baby installations are only the medium to approach this topic. They constitute a kind of multi-dimensionality in my painting. The responses from my gender also prompted me to try this approach on a male perspective.虚幻的帷幕Visional Curtain 200×200cm 2013
In the beginning, I chose models from art students and the children Itaught in the class for the obvious reason that I could have easy communication with them and capture their metal states quickly. Later I focused more on Wang Ze to create a series of Pet Old Boys. Then I had a bigger project to depict contemporary men in their family life, philia and love, surrounded by loneliness, hesitations and nameless passions. OriginallyIused direct and clear black-white distinction to impact my own feelings with this regime. Later Irelied more on colors to articulate the effects, using of course the Chinese ink and water to exploit the shadow and reality dialectics. In this aspect, My father’s style of calligraphy influenced my hugely.
The Pet Old Boys series is a sketch of the spiritual state of society in our epoch as a mourning of the lost youth of a generation. As a female member of that generation, I tried my best to be free of my gender prejudices by choosing the view of observation very carefully. I have given up the female gaze in doing the series, and tried to exchange perspectives with the male counterpart regarding techniques, expressions, frameworks in order to represent the male side of the story. It is quite an achievement to read the loneliness of a man, his mental state behind the smoke and discourses around him. I followed Nietzsche in understanding the bravery and freedom on a man: “The spirit is wayward, realized in an act, even in an savage, is an act out of the will of power”. The machine of time could wear men in a cruel way, it is art that could use its metaphysical gesture to keep the tragic being-in-the world of a man in such a scale.对白 The Dialogue 100×150cm 2014
Special Thanks Go To…
My parents taught me how to love genuinely, to understand the way of life naturally, to live a meaningful life calmly, to appreciate my own singularity divinely, to embrace art, writing courageously and to cherish all these in a great gratitude and respect. Their philosophy of hard working, persistence, easy going practice in daily life, clear ethical boundaries and intellectual pursuit, along with all those teachings of traditional virtues, have been the driving force behind me. Many a time I have made the hypothesis that if I was not born in such a family, it could be like living in a war-time age. I have written a series of essays in the name of “My Spiritual Fathers” to commemorate the days when I could be nourished in such environment, as an example for other parents. In the past decade, especially in the past five years, I also wrote a lot on my teaching practices in the art world, in order to relay the love I received from my parents and mentors to my students and their parents.
I am so grateful that my husbandhas been supporting me through these years in addition to his sacrifice of time modeling for me for so many key works, the maintenance work he took for as his chord, and the arguments and feelings we have exchanged about my works. We often discuss art, life, and the male destiny night after night. Without him as my muse, my works could not be so resounding and pertinent. We watched works of and movies aboutModigliani together, time and again. And in picking me up from the studio, he was reading the writings of Da Vinci or of other artists. He was always along me, even when I went to exhibit in Venice Biennale and other European cities. As a prodigy in the schools days, he had his career in economy and investment in film making, music recording and also had his own label of music. He has the enthusiasm to share with all those whom he met. As a spouse, he is the spiritual leader and also the most devoted collector of myworks. As an artist in my mind, he is gift to me from the heaven.
No word could be enough to express my gratitude to my daughter Cherry for the inspirations, the light, the love and the intimacy she brought into my world. After a day of hard work, Icould enjoy the physical and spiritual consolation she could so cleverly provided to me. Her kissing and embracing is invincible. And her understanding for my having to live in studio moved me greatly. 
Many thanks for all the endorsement I have got from my mentors and great unties in my dark and self-doubt years. I really appreciate all the physical presence of you in my odyssey from Hunan to Beijing!
On early morning of March 22,2015
Written by:Fang Ya-ping