You are an artist who is talented but also brave and sincere. So to speak with you about your art inevitably means discussing your self. That is not easy in the first place, and moreover, we do not know each other well. Beyond that, I am a man, and a foreigner, so naturally I am a bit nervous.
The third reason is simple: Chinese is not my first language, so I am afraid of expressing myself unclearly.
Xiang Jing: In the process of making art, I have struggled with the exact question you mentioned: could it be that art is nothing more than concepts? Western conceptual art belatedly arrived in China and became quite popular in the 1990s as people attempted to diverge from existing aesthetic norms and diversify the languages and materials used in art. Underlying this trend was a set of postmodern theories and issues that surged like a massive tide in the Chinese avant-garde and were even used to determine whether a given artist was “contemporary” or “not contemporary.” At the time, I was extremely perplexed. Art is not like math, in which one plus one equals two, and formulas apply, and there is a “correct” and an “incorrect.” First of all, conceptual art eliminated the visual emphasis of art. Certainly, art is an intellectual exercise, but I do not think that art is the best tool to express abstract thought, because it ultimately yields a visually realized product. If something is no more than a so-called concept, then I think it is better to express it in writing, because written language is better for clearly expressing logical ideas. In fact, Western conceptual art long since suffered a crisis at its pinnacle. The overemphasis on methodology led to the rise of a set of formulas in contemporary art on the international stage. In major international exhibitions and fairs, you can see a large quantity of these formulaic works, which appear quite inscrutable but are not actually difficult to understand because of the set of powerful mechanisms of interpretation that underlie them. When I look at contemporary art, it often strikes me as a