Esoteric Mountain N’ Sea operates as a pictorial encoding of the original symbolic language system developed in Now It Is Mountain and Sea, extending it into a panel-based experiment in visual inscription. Through a non-linear and multidirectional mode of writing, the work reactivates language as a visual and operative form, recalling its archaic entanglement with ritual, invocation, and proto-magical thinking.
The textual substrate is derived from a re-reading of the “Imperial Daughter” mythologies in The Classic of Mountains and Seas, including motifs such as Xihe giving birth to the ten suns, Changxi bathing the moon, Nüba halting the rains, Nüchou veiling her face, and the metamorphic body of the female corpse. Rather than narrating these episodes, the work traces the shifting configurations of feminine archetypes at the threshold between myth and history, examining how they are continually rearticulated between cosmological agency and the structuring forces of divine order. The term “esoteric” here does not denote secrecy in a doctrinal sense, but foregrounds the unwritten, non-institutional, and often obscured nature of these transformations.
Formally, the work seeks to restore the imagistic condition of language, in which signs no longer function primarily as carriers of stable meaning, but as visual operators that activate perception and summon fields of intensity. The process of encoding unfolds not only as linear inscription, but as radial projection and diagrammatic expansion, staging a return toward a pre-semantic regime in which language, image, and cosmology remain indistinguishable.
