Artist:Li Zhenhua

It was perhaps during my time in high school when I first started reading The Old Man and the Sea. The details of this story have faded from my memory; the image of the old man is constantly metamorphosing. I even forgot there was a young boy in the story and a scene of the old man battling with the shark; these tiny elements of my experience of the story were engulfed in the waves of memories. It was in 1989, or maybe in 1988,when I read it -- I cannot precisely recall. That piece of memory seems to have auto-deleted itself with only a tiny trace of it left, leaping in my mind,waiting a next foothold to appear in the back, near the horizon.Childhood memories, from passionate heroism to emotional ups-and-downs, reside deeply in each of us. When television was not popular, the book was the best teacher of man. Sometimes we project the stories that we read onto our parents and teachers, or onto those unknown. In our lives,books are like miniatures of humanity and society. Perhaps the experience of reading a book also comes from the perception and knowledge structure of the reader, thus, characters in a book are endowed with features of the reader’s local culture, and imagined images of other cultures. Alexandre Dumas, Ernest Hemingway, Tolstoy may all have big beards; the photographs in these books are black and white, therefore these people must be Caucasian, and must come from the United States or the Soviet Union – these were the parameters of our imagination of ‘the West’ back then. It only seemed to be right for a foreigner to come from the United States or the Soviet Union. The stories of these people blend with Chinese ‘Wuxia’ stories (Chinese chivalry novels) in my mind, and ferment a kind of chivalric spirit. Perhaps this is also where Wong Kar-Wai and Stephen Chow’s
inspiration originates. Be it Alexandre Dumas in his sickbed, or the legends of the flying swordsman, emotions and things in the world reflected in them are where we draw tears from and lament.The impacts of real-life incidents and television news construct another world where countless ties link people who are distant from each other in real life, while familiar names and things become alienated. What happens around us happens as before, but our perceptions of the world parachute in from the other side of the Earth, in a completely different world.This is another world. I came from somewhere else, and I ought to go back. Mass media, information and travel engender both confusion and benefits, leading to an understanding of how we live in one world, and how cultures succeed to or connect with each other. Furthermore, how can we detach ourselves from historical conditions? Changes might already have been happening, naturally and unnoticeably. The story of “First Drift
Yangtze River Adventures” and the anecdotes of Yu Chunshun are interlaced, weaving my personal memory of growing up, a net that I do not need to escape from.I want to write a story for each image in this exhibition; stories about individuals, with affections and without specific time or location. These stories are like history books: brief, full of nameless figures, blurred. If we investigate the stories of people in history, if we try to illustrate one’s profile from a conglomeration of his or her life stories, we will notice that this profile alters when illustrated in different historical periods, in order to resonate with the needs of time and the writing of history itself. In this enduring process, the profile behaves like a multi-dimensional shape driven by algorithms.
Even today, I am not entirely clear about what Hemingway intended to say with The Old Man and the Sea. If he was to depict his own life, then would the images in the book be projected on the readers stealthily? Perhaps this is why reading perplexes us sometimes. I’ve always imagined myself becoming the characters in the book, and often ended up with a sense of anxiety about the feeling of seeing double. My adolescence is awash with these kinds of feelings: in class, during those sleepless nights, those literary tales of humanity accompanied me, they became my friends.
All these stories are also my own story. Writing is a narrative process of transmitting one’s own knowledge to others. I’m the selfish one. I want to hoard these stories and bury them deeply within me. Believe it or not, this exhibition is the personal history of an anonymous person whose name will never appear in a book. He firmly believes that this will be his fate. He shall embrace the pounding waves in the sea of life, safari among the
puzzling and the unpredictable, and eventually be wrecked by the sea.