Yujing Cheng

I decided to start deconstructing and editing her memories. I used a tiny font to describe the events and people I misses and yearns for. In this very private carrier of information, a dramatic narrative is undergoing subtle changes that are difficult to identify. 

This is the stage that involves the physicality and materiality of language, full of the possibility of communication. The individual's mind and tentative being merge in this private place. Writing traces like fingerprint and metaphorises the characteristics of internal uniqueness and identity. 

A hidden and unknown one-act play is taking place. 

Love is not a possibility, it does not exist based on our efforts and positive attitude, it can hit us and hurt us for no reason. 

  —Die Zeit und der Andere (1979), Emmanuel Levinas 

We are souls cut apart by Apollo, and in order to return to wholeness, love and desire that are inextricably linked become a permanent force in the soul. Also, from the original dual identity of the material and the spiritual, desire gradually shifts to a purely spiritual force. 

We strive to polish and wrap ourselves, to find a complete self in the universe of things, a kind of spiritual self-knowledge. 

When gazed at by one's lover, one's self is instantly transformed into a radiant body of beauty, which is also the other that one cannot conquer in the kingdom of the self. The wings of the lover are awakening, and the soul is nourished, as if it is about to be incarnated as a Satyr, devouring the elements of beauty in his arms. 

When the passion is gone, that fanatical, lingering and touching lover’s discourse is lost in the ruins of memories. They lie tranquil in the wild grass and praise the whispers that were once continual. They make the subject, they make the self. 

But now they are noiseless places.

This is a place where there are no miniatures of unrecognisable typefaces, and no words of fantasy that cannot be seen. Only the size of the frame increases the distance from which to read the text. 

White is a kind of enhanced achromatism, while paleness is a sign of a lack of strength. Here, it is a manic bank of snow, where the emotions run, the thoughts run and the will strengthens. Hidden in the frantic scratches is the longing for love. 

The sentence in the painting is from the tragedy Salome, by the British aesthete and writer Oscar Wilde. ‘The mystery of love is greater than that of death’. Between the lines, without elaboration, simple words blur the subject's ‘identity’ and ‘corporeality’, and trigger various possibilities. Smooth, neat words are like the skin wrapped with ‘meaning’: the secret is covered, concealed. This sentence is a metaphor for the mystery of love – not only love itself, but it even implies a taboo love, which is an ethical relationship of love related to identity and gender. 

The love, fiery desire, and endless thoughts that we are familiar with make up this field, lurking wantonly in the silent habitat. 

Our thoughts veer between consciousness and subconsciousness, in a chaotic state of ‘betwixt and between’. Automatic writing moves at the tip of the pen, and changes the shape of the chalcedony. ‘Desire’ hopes to be released but is hidden again.