Alternative Mountain N’ Sea: Mirage is conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk composed of multiple unmounted textile paintings, knotted-cord masks, and soft sculptural forms. The project takes as its methodological point of departure the historical format of the frame painting, a nearly forgotten mode of display in which silk paintings were presented before being mounted as scrolls. By revisiting this form, the work retraces the conditions of pictorial manifestation before the institutional consolidation of both the scroll and the easel as dominant systems of painting, reconsidering painting in its earlier capacity as a spatial interface and narrative medium.
Within the material language of the project, the works do not use pigment in the conventional sense. Instead, they develop a system of structural coloration generated through the layered accumulation of transparent materials across multiple canvases. Different translucent substances are arranged in stratified layers, allowing light to refract, reflect, and interfere within the structure, so that color no longer exists as a fixed chromatic substance but emerges dynamically in the act of viewing. This method is inspired by the artist’s close observation and dissection of butterfly specimens, whose wings often produce color not through pigment but through microscopic structures that scatter and interfere with light. The surfaces also incorporate natural materials gathered from different regions, including sand, stone powder, glass beads, and mica. Mixed with transparent acrylic medium, these materials are transformed into painting matter and participate in the generation of the image. In this sense, painting becomes less a flat operation of chromatic application than a spatial surface shaped by material layering, optical reaction, and temporal deposition.
The project further investigates the structural motif of line and its relation to weaving, exploring their symbolic and sociological dimensions within human culture. It reflects on how these elements, once embedded in systems of memory, ritual, and narrative production, were gradually reduced to mere material or technical functions within the regimes of perspective and modern image-making. Masks and knotted cords appear as historical carriers of identity and text, mediating between body and narrative while suggesting that humans have long woven not only stories, but also the fabric of the self.
Within this framework, the notion of the “海市(Sea Market/Mirage)” is reinterpreted as a form of displaced reality. It refers both to the description in The Classic of Mountains and Seas of the “Market of the Great People,” where merchants on stilts gathered along the seashore, and to the modern resonance of the term “mirage”, which evokes projections of illusion and imagined worlds.
Alternative Mountain N’ Sea series does not seek to reconstruct canonical mythological scenes. Instead, it examines how mythic imagery undergoes continuous shifts of meaning across the thresholds of historical reality and psychological memory. In an age characterized by the mass reproduction and archival circulation of images, the series attempts to reopen the primordial condition of painting, allowing it to reconnect with the contemporary world through processes of spatial displacement, movement, and emergence.
Special Thanks:
Sponsored by Dongjiang Granary
Film edited by Tong Jia
