The Soul of Objects: Shi Xiang’s Cotton

A slight vibration! A ball of cotton, accompanied by trembling threads, emerges lightly from the calm paper. The threads, like clouds of smoke, entangle and envelop the invisible cotton, and make it bloom with their own density and strength, which are different every time. The cotton has obviously been stained with carbon and moistened with ink, but it is still pure white, because they are woven by the threads in a vacuum. To be more precise, it is precisely the thread that constructs this vacuum, this free white space for breathing heavily: in the cotton painted by the thread, the artist excludes any possibility of coloring, and even in the thickest shadows, there are holes that are inevitably left out by the intersection of the thread and the thread. But it is these vaporous pores, rather than the solid traces of thread, that support the space of the cotton, the lumpy mass that wraps around the air if it is there at all. So what is cotton? What kind of presence do these threads, traditionally used to shape form, give to form? Cotton is the fiber that bursts in the wind, the dust that condenses into flotsam, the mist exhaled by plants, and the snow that air compresses into. In a sense, it is an existence close to nothing, an ethereal existence lacking form. The artist has already captured the ambiguity of this object between the visible and the invisible: under the dance of charcoal and pencil, the extreme bloom of cotton wool is also its dispersal, and the momentary manifestation is also its permanent concealment; however, in the erosion of gray, the quietly growing blank force injects the swelling breath into the movement of the cotton’s growth, and thus, the strong ink lines are always splashing outward, and the posture of its breaking free from the paper is like a butterfly that breaks out of its chrysalis and emerges. Its gesture of breaking away from the paper is like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.

I would say that the cotton is the essence of the butterfly, and it belongs to those things under the daylight that are always dodging, fluttering, and incomparably light, those things that are always generating, and always unfinished: when it soars, it has also fallen; when it blooms, it has also withered; when it is full, it is also scarce. And yet, it still exists, and even though its form is ever-changing, its essence remains the same: cotton is cotton is cotton is cotton. Repeated dozens of times, cotton is still cotton, always one, the only one, the lonely one, the essential one. The artist prudently tries to paint it, constantly modifying the image he paints as he does so, and preserving the traces of erasure. As a result, each cotton arrives with its more or less scuffed papier-mâché remnants. There is no perfect cotton, but each one satisfies the painter, who has already closed his brush. In this sense, Shi Xiang is not a Platonic painter; he does not store the idea of eternal beauty in his mind and try to reproduce some perfect model accordingly. On the contrary, he paints cotton in all its forms, but what he thinks about is only one piece of cotton, an ordinary one picked out from the pile, one that suits him and fascinates him. This one was his model, his lover, his close friend. Once chosen, he signed a sacred contract with it and began to look at it endlessly, playing with it until he recognized its unique look, texture and smell. It was as if the cotton came to life and spoke to him, revealing to him the secrets wrapped up in its fluff, the secrets of nothingness, the secrets of instant appearance and disappearance, the secrets of clouds and butterflies. From then on, accompanied by this gust of fluff that only he could hear, cotton was no longer a strange foreign object, but became a part of his body, the softest, the lightest, the warmest and the innermost part, the nearest part of the center of the world. Cotton is not cotton, but the fluttering clouds and butterflies of his heart: in several paintings, the cracked cotton is like a giant butterfly, and the butterfly with spreading wings is also a beating heart.

So, what is this cotton of Shi Xiang? It is the cotton that dives into the depths of the painter’s heart and makes him think about it day and night. It has faded away the material attributes of reality, but retains the impression of each attribute, and is even softer, whiter and purer than real cotton. It is the cotton in the painter’s dream: the image of a cotton. In order to approach and obtain this image, the painter must dream. Not actively fantasizing, not intentionally imagining, but gazing at the cotton with his inner eye for a long time and giving himself completely to the infinite space that opens up when the cotton slowly fades away under his gaze.
The fading space, the faraway space. That fading space, that distance, that floating void, is the world of dreams, a world born out of death and absence. But this world is also full of infinite life, infinite possibilities, and the image survives in such infinity. It has lost its essence, and there are only endless copies that resemble each other, attracting painters to tirelessly paint it over and over again. Painting, according to Shi Xiang, means transformation. And in the endless dream, the cotton has been transformed by the painter’s mind. When he captures the image of the cotton, he catches the thing that resembles the cotton: this mist, this cloud, this butterfly that is close to his heart.

Cotton is the butterfly of the essence, because the butterfly is a marvelous image of the transformation of the dream. The painter dreams of cotton, just as Zhuang Zhou dreams of butterflies. In the painter who has mastered the power of transformation, the dream for the object viewed is always a butterfly dream. In this mysterious dream, the real mystery of transformation is expressed in the dialectics of “materialization”: people dream of butterflies, butterflies also dream of people. And the painter to cotton into the dream, and does not mean that the painter broke into the cotton dream? Cotton of course has its dream, as Gaston Bashira said, every substance has its own dream. This dream is the space of images that the thing opens up in the human heart, and whoever encounters the images falls into the dream of the thing. This dream is the rest and slumber of the matter, the dark night in which the matter is able to hold on to its secrets. In order not to break this tranquility, the artist has to turn his brush into a blind stick, groping and wandering in the night of the dream. These thick black strokes are the tracks of his courageous march, and these wrinkled white scuffs are the stumbles of his hesitant retreat. And those fine gray lines are his elegant dance in the darkness. Through all these threads and scratches of varying thickness and strength, Shi Xiang wove the cotton into the image of the dream itself: a hazy, thin web that covered the retina. If, in his eyes, thread is the original material of dreams, then he, who chases the cotton thread with his brush, is naturally a dreamwalker who is pulled by the thread.

Painting is dreaming. Before painting cotton, the painter has dreamed for a long time: he has dreamed of the moon, the clouds, the trees, the stones, the fruits …… He freely wanders in the dreams of various objects. At the same time, he also delves into the dreams of the materials used for drawing: the dreams of toner, the dreams of lead blocks, the dreams of charcoal pencils, the dreams of paper pages, the dreams of erasers …… He engages in transformations between the dreams of the objects and the dreams of the drawings, and the effect is comparable to that of a butterfly transformation: he paints the whiteness of cotton with the blackness of ink, and the lightness of velvet with the heaviness of lead. All contradictions are reconciled in the dream of the line. The line is everything, the line is the world. But the painter’s line does not float on the surface of the world, as it seems to do, but spreads to the interior of the world and touches the deepest things. When the thread transforms the dream of matter, the thread also becomes the song of the depths of the earth, the song of Orpheus, because in that song, as Rilke wrote, everything is transformed and purified towards the inner depths. This is the thread of Schönherr: an Orpheus’ note that opens up the inner universe, a pure poem that leads everything out of gravity and upwards in a gentle dance. At the end of the transformation, the inner universe also reaches the boundless realm, and the thread begins to expand and stretch, releasing a huge cotton.

Shi Xiang’s cotton must be enormous. The size of the cotton is not the size of the paper, not the width of the eye, but the breadth of the heart itself, the size of the soul of the object that corresponds to the scale of the heart. When the painter listens to the murmur of things in his dreams, he has already encountered the soul of things. Therefore, it is never cotton that he looks at, but the soul of cotton. What he paints is never the line, but the tremor of the line, the tremor of the soul. In the cotton’s dream, he suddenly recognized that every breath of the cotton is also the rise and fall of the soul, just as every beating of the butterfly’s wings is the leap of the heart. Thus, the world emptied, leaving only the invisible rhythm of everything, the ejection of particles and the oscillation of chords. The painter, alone in the dark country of lines, hides himself in ink and carbon, in order to search for the same sleeping things in the vast night, and records the souls escaping from the shells of things with his dreamy eyes. He treats the remains of these souls well, and keeps vigil for them so that they can be revived on paper. Because he firmly believes that the most silent nature is also alive. He does not paint still life. In order to bring things to life, he only needs to make a butterfly vibrate its wings once, that is, to pluck the strings of the universe once with his brush. A well-deserved musician of the soul. But his songs are songs of the night, songs of silence. Just as his beloved snowy bamboo filters out the clamor of the world, so this ethereal cotton mutes all noise. No one will come back to disturb the rest of things, no one will come back to disturb the peace of the dream. Butterflies spread their wings freely, and cotton blooms only for the sake of blooming. No one’s cotton. His paintings are indeed “still” things.