The Long Way Around

“Listen to me. I don’t want to perish. At the moment of losing all that, I longed to return, not only to a country, not only to a certain region, but to the house where I was born.”——Peter Handke

What makes “homecoming” so fascinating? Just like Homer’s story of Odysseus, who is carried off the ship in his sleep to return home; or the protagonist in Handke’s book, who tries to fight against a fate to perish and embarks on a journey back to his former residence. “Homecoming”, usually written in words, echoes throughout the artistic practice of Hu Wei and Xiang Kaiyang, while the symbiotic relationship between text and art is also examined in both artists’ works: revolving around issues of aesthetics and poetics, their art probes the boundaries between language, semantics and imagery.

In Hu Wei’s video and sound installations, the absent images, limbed languages and meanings are transformed into a particular rhythm and subtle emotions. “…Island is the second origin. Only on the island can people feel that they are detached from the world.” Hu Wei’s investigation into the marine culture can be considered as a pursuit of “home”. His non-paradigmatic, dynamic, and variable series of works evoke our imaginations of the “sea nomad (human & non-human)”.

When looking at Cézanne’s landscape paintings, Handke realises that the pine trees and cliffs overlap each other in the picture, forming an interrelated, singular hieroglyph as well as a complete integration of “thing-image-script”. The Word painting series by Xiang Kaiyang is a typical example of Handke’s viewpoint. The artist places words onto the canvas, whose inner harmony is then strengthened through the repeated use of reduplication. His work explores the spiritual qualities beyond the text itself, featuring a fresh interaction beyond the conventional aesthetic relationship between word and image.

Perhaps we can regard “homecoming” as a state stripped of the notion of time, a mixture of the protagonist’s inner and outer worlds woven from memory fragments. “Homecoming” in Hu Wei’s work alludes to a projection of reality that probably involves the artist’s own struggle against “home” and freedom; in regards to Xiang Kaiyang’s work, the memories triggered by images strive to approach the original appearance of things. Isn’t it also a kind of “return” to real life?