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仿徐渭榴实图，收藏级哈内姆勒 摄影纯棉 硫酸钡，150×120cm，2021

M: The exhibition title “A Snowy Day” is like a snowfall in June—a deliberate creation of a snowy scene in the height of summer, an artificial reversal of the seasons. Does this dislocation of time reflect a sense of dissatisfaction with the injustice of fate? Since you began seeking medical help at the age of eight, has the question “Why me?” ever crossed your mind?

H: Creating a snowy scene in midsummer was meant to contrast with the long-standing human experience of orderly seasons—to present the impossible within people’s rigid expectations. People tend to associate illness with misfortune and pity. Few consider that illness, like health, may also be a gift of life—just a different way of experiencing it. Life is an experience: some people travel smoothly along a wide road, while others must cross mountains and endure wind and rain, thus gaining different life experiences.

Zhuangzi once said, “Life and death are simultaneous.” Once you understand that life is a process of experience, you can transcend the ideas of“fortune” and “misfortune.” Our differences create different kinds of value. A life with value is one worth experiencing.

“Dissatisfaction with injustice” is merely a complaint. Artworks do not need to complain; they are about life, spirit, and eternity. That’s why this exhibition carries a traditional lineage, the vastness of the cosmos, and the endless waves of tender green wheat.

M: In the main installation work Tao Hua Yuan, you physically fought with flour to create “snow”covering dry branches. After the performance ended, the boxing gloves and snowy scene remained as the core of the installation. Does this performance metaphorically suggest the idea of “exchanging physical depletion for the nutrients of survival”? In today’s reality, what do you think a Tao Hua Yuan-like vision of happiness means to us? And the pill-disguised “buds” among the branches—do they imply that this nourishment is actually a kind of “pain-relieving illusion”? You chose to perform from a second-floor scaffold, forcing the audience to look up—does this vertical spatial relationship simulate the power dynamic of a medical setting, like ‘hospital bed/doctor’? More broadly, just as flour must be struck to become snow, does art, too, require a kind of pain to come into being?

H: That’s a good question. I hadn’t considered the “power structure within medical settings,” but I don’t reject such an interpretation.

There’s no standard answer when it comes to viewing a work of art—it doesn’t require the artist’s confirmation. Creating art is simply amplifying the way I perceive the world and sharing that with others. Everyone has their own way of interpreting and accessing a work.

I say this is a good question because it not only raises a point, but also reveals the questioner’s personal feelings and interpretation of the work. Thank you.

M: In Conversation in the Snow Hall, after Xia Gui, you reconstruct the aesthetic of a Song dynasty painting using medicinal herbs like poria and mistletoe. Does this transformation of medicine into landscape symbols explore the connection between the traditional painting ideal of “reclining travel” (wo you) and contemporary spiritual healing? You mentioned that the first layer is traditional Chinese medicine powder, and the second layer is Western pharmaceutical powder—how do you view the relationship between traditional aesthetics and Westernized art?

H: The Southern Song Dynasty was already a regime relegated to a corner of the land, yet its culture in turn exerted influence over the surrounding regions. Mistletoe is a traditional medicinal herb—a semi-parasitic shrub that typically grows on tall trees like mulberry or pear. For me, Westernized art and traditional aesthetics exist as surface and substance.

M: In Tao Hua Yuan, the “buds” on the branches, the snowy landscape reconstructed from medicinal powders in Conversation in Snow Hall, after Xia Gui, as well as works like Antique and Medicine, all reflect a shift—from personal experiences of illness (such as your long-term use of medication) to broader societal “symptoms.” Does this suggest that the spirit of classical landscape painting now requires “medicine” as its remedy? And that you’ve come to view art-making itself as a kind of self-treatment?

H: Nature is medicine. Landscape is medicine. Culture is medicine. Perhaps these can even have healing effects on social symptoms. But we’re all too busy to take the dose, and often don’t feel the need. This kind of answer might sound old-fashioned. An artist ultimately must return to the individual. For me, creating is fundamentally about: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?

M: In your work, recurring fragile materials like dry branches, pills, and flour are often juxtaposed with Song-dynasty painting and Buddhist symbols. In A Study in Pink Medicine, you mention sensing an “inborn Eastern aesthetic” in your genes. This delicacy—almost to the point of frailty—seems to evoke a kind of “fragile eternity.” How do you view the notion of “morbid beauty” within Chinese traditional aesthetics?

H: What I understand as “delicacy and fragility” is actually subtlety—a refined sensitivity to the workings of heaven and earth. It’s a life attitude found in the ancients’ way of expressing emotion and contemplating all things.

After finishing A Study in Pink Medicine, I kept associating the imagery with Dream of the Red Chamber, so I went back to read it. Perhaps the mood of the piece resonates with some of the novel’s imagery—or maybe that’s just my own subjective projection as a creator.

A culture that reaches the height of subtlety inevitably produces a kind of fragile beauty—one that is fleeting, unattainable, and not to be desecrated. The phrase “a beauty so delicate it borders on frailty” emphasizes extremity, not sickness. “Frailty” here doesn’t mean pathological. Take the line from Song lyrics, “She is thinner than the yellow chrysanthemum”—if you interpret that as morbid, you completely miss the romance.

“The old road, the west wind, a thin horse; withered vines, ancient trees, dusk crows”—are the “withered vines and old trees” a kind of morbid beauty? No, they evoke a beauty of atmosphere.

In traditional Eastern aesthetics, there’s the delicate beauty of Liu Yong and Li Qingzhao, the bold beauty of Su Shi and Xin Qiji, the unrestrained beauty of Ji Kang and Ruan Ji, the serene beauty of Tao Yuanming, and the wild, unhinged beauty of Xu Wei. These are all expressions of what I call “the Eastern aesthetic latent in my genes.”

M: From the “inexplicably green branches”in Pomegranates, after Xu Wei to the declaration of “Spring” in A Study in Green Medicine, the color green in your work seems to have evolved from an intuitive choice to a conscious symbol. Does this color embody a different understanding of survival for you? And how do you interpret Xu Wei’s madness?

H: Green is the river of life—broad and enduring, flowing ceaselessly through time. Green is the seed; green is the grass that grows again when the wind blows. Xu Wei “held the past in contempt and stood alone in his time.” His madness carried both the frustration of great talent left unrecognized and symptoms of illness. What I draw from him is the unyielding, indomitable vitality of his spirit.

M: Compared to directly exhibiting installations, you seem more inclined to present much of your studio work through photography in a more open-ended way. Does this “secondary creation” through photography give your work a new kind of life? How do you view the difference between photographic documentation and in-person experience?

H: Some ideas are better suited to be presented as installations, while others work more appropriately through photography. (Photography is photography—it’s an independent artistic medium, not just a tool to document other media.) The content of a work determines its form. I don’t intentionally draw strict boundaries between mediums, nor do I prefer one material over another.

Take this exhibition as an example: the installation Tao Hua Yuan required bodily involvement, so I incorporated performance. That live action naturally gave rise to video and photographic works. The photographic piece Sustained-release Cosmos was created by scanning capsule granules directly with a film scanner. You could call it photography, though no camera was used; but you could also argue it is photography, because it relied on the scanner’s lens. So I don’t reject any form.

(Two of my wall-based works from 2021 are titled White Sculpture and Pink Sculpture. Some people were confused—how can a wall piece be called a sculpture? I was playing with a pun: the “sculpture” refers to the body being shaped and molded by medication. I deliberately used the thematic content to disrupt the conventional boundaries between forms.)

H: As the Treatise on the Five Teachings of Huayan says, “One is all, and all is one.”

The English poet William Blake wrote, “To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower.”Every fundamental particle that makes up my body contains within it mountains and rivers, lakes and seas, the sun, the moon, and the stars.