丢失的档案-13，33×22cm，油画棒 纸本，2000 乔纳森·迈尔斯
The Lost Archive-13, Oil pastel on paper, 33×22cm, 2000 Jonathan Miles
On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, Mocube is pleased to present The Softening of All Edges, a dual exhibiton featuring British artist Jonathan Miles and Chinese artist Xu Chenxi. The following text is an extended conversation between curator Deng Ting and the two artists, offering further reflections on the themes of the exhibition. In the following interview, "Deng Ting" is abbreviated as "D," "Jonathan Miles" as "J" and "Xu Chenxi" as "X".
1. Quantity as Form
D: Jonathan, in your Abstract 1000 series, quantity seems to be a central issue. Audiences often ask: Are these thousand works merely a formal construct? When individual pieces might dissolve into the vast whole, is there something that still persists through repetition?
J: Abstract 1000 set up a question or a series of questions for which there is no answer rather there is an exploration of a threshold between the for and beyond of representation and within this an exploration of states of repetition and difference. The work itself sets up the possibility that the task of doing might yield a relationship to an exposure to what is at risk within the disappearance into the chance element embedded in such an encounter with meaning and its loss.
D: I understand that what you mean by “repetition” here is not mechanical, but rather a dynamic tension between doing and disappearing. Chenxi, your works also have a similar rhythm of “emergence–dissipation.” How would you respond?
X: I often try to capture a “sense of breath” on the canvas—it is both repetitive and instantaneous. Brushstrokes and color halos appear and vanish like breathing, and the picture continues in uncertainty. I think this is very close to what Jonathan calls “risk.” I am not someone who is easily drawn to stillness. Yet, in my life experience, emotion and intuition have led me to witness the most powerful force of “quiet,” and so I believe in it deeply. Still, I often find myself in a restless state. In creation, I strive to make up for this, always struggling to find a place of rest within the chaos. Finally, something light breaks through gravity and surfaces, and at that moment, I feel I have fulfilled this stage of life’s mission.
2. Abstraction and Representation
D: Jonathan, you mentioned that the distinction between abstraction and representation is in fact a false polarity. Do you think truth exists outside of the two?
J: I think of the relation between representation and abstraction as being a false polarity because work often evades the boundary condition which defines such a difference. Thus art is errancy in such matters of defining what is true or false, and resides in the conditions of ambiguity or loss as a mode of uncertainty.
D: I agree with this sense of “ambiguity.” Chenxi, your works contain transparent abstraction while also preserving traces of physicality. How do you see this shifting?
X: The language of abstraction is oblique—it leaves only certain traces or symbols for the viewer. Yet within this condensation, what remains is solely the intensity of emotion. Whether steady or fluctuating, struggling or surrendering, fragile or ecstatic, all are forms of change, and such change is endless. In my subconscious there is certainly exposure, but the canvas does not necessarily enact it literally; rather, it presents this instability and uncertainty in order to seek continuation.
3. Image and Painting
D: Let’s talk about the image. Jonathan, you’ve distinguished between “the image of painting” and “the painting of the image,” and you used the metaphor of the monk and the prisoner to speak about time. Could you elaborate further?
J：What is the difference between a monk and a prisoner? The prisoner is expected to do a stretch of time, whereas the monk attempts to absorb time itself by rendering its passage as illusory. Painters might be seen as exercising both time’s passage and its loss, and instead choose to be in a state of fascination as a form of withdrawal into the absence of time. Beckett is an example of such a posture—an arrest of time’s continuity of sense—and for this reason he has been framed as an absurd writer.
D: Chenxi, what is the most primordial, the most essential element in your work? And how do you understand the relation between painting and time?
X: Apart from nature, what else could be the very beginning? When I start with a face, it is unconscious, unplanned—it simply begins, and then naturally ends, driven only by the simplest intuition. Attraction is the catalyst of intuition; it generates both distance and intimacy, and that makes me feel alive. I think that in painting I subconsciously evade the weight that time imposes. Yet the results, slowly formed, in turn respond to the beautiful sedimentation that time brings. I always feel that these “extremely light” things accumulate into an overall wisdom, with time naturally flowing among them.
D: Your Faster, Still Faster, Until Stillness is a title full of tension. In your view, can painting chase after consciousness, or be “driven” by it? Is it dynamic or static?
X: I don’t think it can fully keep pace with consciousness, nor is it always driven by it. But there must be a kind of contest—a middle state, a space filled with imagination. Within this space, the image keeps coming into being, just as I am now answering your question: my mind keeps producing an immediate response. This immediacy is partial, yet full of tension; it can reach exhaustion, but it also leaves deep traces.
4.The Fusion of Culture and Medium
D: Jonathan, you once mentioned that the influence of Eastern art lies not in its appearance, but in its way of perception. What kinds of spiritual or philosophical resources have you drawn from Asian cultures? How have they influenced your artistic and literary practices?
J: The influence of Far Eastern Classical Art derives not so much from its appearance, but rather from the way a painter might use the feet as an organ of perception, creating a synthesis with the eyes as organs of perception. In this way, there emerges a relationship between vision and blindness, or more precisely, between what is sensed and what is seen.
J: What do you think about the merging of the West and the East?
D: For me, the fusion of East and West is not a simple patchwork, but rather a process of “mirroring each other.” I have personally moved back and forth between Eastern and Western contexts of study and life: on the one hand, Western art education has accustomed me to understanding works within logical frameworks and critical discourses; on the other hand, I have always been deeply drawn to Eastern culture and philosophy. When I bring these experiences into curatorial practice, the rationality and critical methods of the West help me construct a clear narrative framework, while the Eastern mode of perception reminds me to leave space, to allow breathing room between the work and the audience. The fusion of East and West, for me, is more like a dynamic balance.
D: Chenxi, in your work, the “migration of mediums” between electronic screens, skin, paper, and canvas is very apparent. Is this constant shifting a process of “searching for a true vessel”?
X: Yes, it is always in such a state of searching. No result has ever told me that I have already found a refuge. Perhaps their combination is a kind of hazy answer, and yet this answer seems to remain perpetually hazy. In such a condition, the significance of any specific medium all but disappears.
X: How do you see the relationship between the two identities of curator and artist for yourself?
D: For me, curation and artistic creation are not two separate paths, but different facets of the same concern. Many people think of curating as organization, planning, and interpretation, while artistic creation is expression and generation. But I prefer to understand curation as a form of artistic practice. When I curate, I am not merely arranging the relationship between works and space, but treating the entire exhibition as a work that can be “experienced.” The rhythm of the space, the threads of narrative, the movements and emotional experiences of the audience—all of these are part of the creation. For me, space is another kind of “canvas.” On this canvas, the medium becomes the works and the audience, colors and lines transform into narrative and space, and through curating, the works of different artists are woven into a shared field of breathing.
5. Lily O and Fiction
D: One last question, Jonathan: when you created the fictional character Lily O, why did you choose to let her “die,” rather than granting her immortality through the text?
J: Lily O emerged as a surprise, because there was no design of such a figure at the beginning of the narrative. But once she appeared, she was implicated in time, and so death became a possibility. When her death occurred, I began to shed tears, because her death was not logical, even though it might have been a necessity—since she had drawn a life between art and life. Through this, I had given rise to a way of figuring the relationship between continuity and discontinuity.
D: This makes me think of a core of art—the emergence of fictional figures or images always brings both creation and disappearance. When I read Jonathan’s Lily O, I felt that she was swept into irreversible time—her very appearance immediately made an “ending” possible. That moment inspired me to create another figure: Wu Meng—a name derived from the phrase “the dream of nothingness.” Wu Meng is not a replica of Lily, but her intimate confidante within an Eastern context. If Lily O stretched out a tension between continuity and discontinuity, between art and life, then Wu Meng tries to sustain, like a thread upheld by breath, the tension between being and non-being: she does not seek immortality, but rather practices perishability.
X: What kind of works would Wu Meng create?
D: I imagine her paintings would be transparent and weightless, with layers of pigment applied and erased, ebbing and flowing like breath, so that viewers always see an “image in the process of vanishing.” She would also migrate across different carriers—paper, screens, skin—writing with fragile, perishable materials (ink traces, ice, evaporating water marks), so that her works are destined to fade. Chenxi, don’t you think that the fleeting moments in your images share a similar fate?
X: Yes. Those color halos, those transparent layers, are actually like Lily O and Wu Meng—they bring a kind of fleeting life. They are not eternal, yet in their dispersal they leave behind traces.
D: I truly cherish today’s conversation. Jonathan has brought reflections on “threshold, ambiguity, and time,” while Chenxi has responded to these themes with “breath, transparency, and the body.” To me, your intersection lies in this: art is both emergence and disappearance; it is the weight of time, and also its suspension.
