Photo credit to studio.lights.on, at the Art Museum, the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

THE CRYING WALL (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII) (2022-2023) is a locale of pseudo-ancient mural installations. The producer lacks any authoritative or credible testimony, aiming to construct archival evidence of a "non-first-person catastrophe" and establish fabricated artifacts of absence. The artist's endeavour ranges from the manipulation of rational spatial architecture through the involvement of 15th-century religious painter Fra Angelico (1395-1455) in fresco painting, to the interpretation of the death politics of post-socialism in Eastern Europe by American anthropologist Katherine Verdery (1948-), attempting to realize the artistic form of nationalism and the secularization transformation of the "sanctity of atheism" in modern politics.

A winding wall, an inverted ship suspended overhead, derived from the Gokstad ship of Scandinavia, stands as a vessel carrying something between the womb of birth and the ark of redemption, unable to reunite with the waters and solitary islands. Two pseudo angels are being woven, resembling the last mythical era described in Ovid's Metamorphoses – the Iron Age, where labour is no longer simple, and seafaring and mining have created borders and regimes. The spider weaving the web of heaven and earth ultimately becomes the requiem for the deceased labourers. Parts I and II are inspired by the film The Color of Pomegranates (1969) of Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990), a Ukrainian director of Armenian descent, during the Soviet era. His expression of national traditional art, mythology, and literature as a soft resistance to the regime embodies the essence of the rootless patriot in my thoughts.

一座捲腹的牆，懸頂的倒船，取自斯堪的納維亞 (Scandinavia) 的戈克斯塔德號船(Gokstadskipet)，承載的容器介乎於出生的子宮和救贖的方舟之間，水域和孤島無法重逢；正在編織的兩名假天使，如羅馬詩人奧維德的《變形記》所描述的最後一個神話時代——「鐵器時代」，勞動不再單純，航海和採礦令邊界國域出現，編織天地之網的蜘蛛，終成為死去勞動者的輓歌。I、II分部取自前蘇聯時期的烏克蘭導演，也是亞美尼亞裔的帕拉贊諾夫(Sergei Parajanov) (1924-1990)的電影作品。這位以民族傳統藝術、神話與文學，向政權的軟抵抗，正是我思想中失根愛國者的表現。

"THE CRYING WALL" (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII and VIII) (2022-2023) 為一組偽古壁畫場域，製作者並沒有任何權威性和可信性的見證，作「非第一身災難」存檔，致力建立不在場的假證物。作者從十五世紀宗教畫匠弗拉·安吉利科（Fra Angelico，1395-1455）對溼壁畫介入理性空間建築之操控，到美國人類學家凱瑟琳·維爾德里（Katherine Verdery，1948-）對東歐後社會主義之死亡政治詮釋，試圖實踐民族主義之藝術形式、現代政治中「無神論之神聖性」的世俗化轉型。

The comical manifesto of image reproduction attempts to prevent the image from wandering on the internet in any informational form. It raises an age-old question: Have rapidly generated mechanically replicated images exploited the dissemination and presence of painting?

The deliberate mediation of communication selectively filters art history. There are always works that exist only in textual records, ghostly remnants that haunt their existence. You can never find unofficial traces of the Mausoleum of Lenin on Red Square, only the immortal reconstructed through associative means, which the craftsman devoutly believes in.

Photo credit to studio.lights.on, at the Art Museum, the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Text by Ho Ting.