Wet, Foggy and green-dark Hills
About three years ago, I was on a bus travelling alone in Morocco. The vehicle shook for hours and there was nothing to do but stare out of the window. The sky was blue but veiled by a paleness of its own heat, the sun burned the bare ground to the color of ochre, it extended far away towards the horizon, where only a few silhouettes of mountains stayed faintly visible with the color of the air. I had memories from my childhood of taking long-distance buses. It was the same kind of shaking road and plain view kept repeating endlessly, except outside was always wet, foggy and green-dark hills, almost another world compared to the dry, bare and vast rocky desert near Tinghir. As a kid growing up in south-middle China, it was hard to imagine a desert. I took a picture with my phone and sent it to my parents, wanting to share this strange but beautiful landscape. Then I thought what this picture would mean to them, would they experience it the way I experience this?
Before I started my MFA study, I had a nomadic life for a while. I travelled across cities in Europe and stayed wherever there was a place for me to sleep. I carried a set of stretch bars and a couple of brushes, so I could keep painting anywhere I ended up. In Berlin the room was too small for an easel and I worked sitting in the door frame, the canvas on my knees, Lana stepped over me to pick up the hanging clothes in the terrace. I painted a walk on the frozen sea, a view from a descending airplane, people waiting for a bus with their faces blurred – I did not care much about the subjects, I would choose a picture from my phone album at random. The frame was 40 x 30 cm, same as the ratio of an iphone picture, 4:3.
Then painting them had already become an exercise of remembrance, time passed and memory got blurry, I started to remember less. The only proof they are mine is that I took them, so I assumed the gaze in the picture is always mine. But if they were not? Can one remember something that they never lived by themselves? So on the bus, among the sleeping faces of the other passengers and the faint smell of gas in the AC bus, I thought of asking my parents to paint what I see, in the same format that I use to remember my own journey. Simple and trivial subjects, picked very casually from the album, similar to the "40 x 30 cm" paintings I have been doing for years.
My mother comes from a farming village in the corner of a basin surrounded by hills in the west of Hunan. She was the first university student in her village. She said she was terrified of the leeches in the rice field when she was a little girl and that was the moment she decided to study hard. It took her two years to pass the exam and she chose to study Painting because of the plus pointages for Fine Art students, better chance to get in. My father is from a small industrial town on the cross of two rivers. He studied painting in the vocational high school because that was the only study which didn't include English language in the course. After that, he became a painter in the local enamel factory for three years, until he finally passed the exams for universities. They met in Huaihua Normal College in 1987, the college students ratio in the whole country that year was 3.6 %.
I was born in 1994, growing up in my parents' studio that was used as a painting class for their students. It was almost synonymous with home, and like home it was never a fixed place for long. We moved so many times within different schools in Hunan that all these places just blend into the same blurry image: shiny floor of dark-grey graphite dust, the dirty chalk head of Jean-Antoine Houdon's Voltaire, which I took for a grandmother, her nose and face blackened with graphite, and the elderly students of my parents, their faces changed again and again. The class was how the family made money, so their own paintings were made at home, in the faint smell of turpentine all the time. And we had stacks of canvases that were placed facing each other neatly occupied silently in every hidden corner of the house over years. Growing up in school or universities did not make me a good student, in fact I was one of the worst students in the classes. They said they never wanted me to become a painter, because they know it is not an easy life to be, but eventually they had to put me into the special preparation course for art students for that might be my own chance to get into a university. They became my teachers, but we had a terrible relationship, so teaching was almost impossible. Except for some occasional afternoons, no fighting or shouting, all three of us quietly worked in front of a painting, sunlight casting a warm square on the table. I eventually passed the exam for university for the great desire of getting as far as possible from them.
I started my life in Europe and they stayed in China. After my departure, without having the cost of raising a child they stopped teaching. Our time together was suddenly compressed into a six hour time difference, unplanned calls and occasionally messages with images of food, weather, and landscapes through a tiny screen in our hands. Every month I choose one picture and send it to them. Each of them paints it, alone, 40 x 30 cm. Sometimes I paint it too. This has been going on for three years, we’d see them all together when I go home, the two paintings next to each other. I travel from place to place and take pictures after pictures, forgetting what I'm seeing. And still, I return to them, mining for fragments to send back. Is it strange to hope that the banal photo of a found postcard from a volcano island, an open book page, or the fingers knitting can carry a vague trace of a feeling, a quiet moment I hadn't realized I wanted them to hold onto. I don't know how the internet works exactly, I think if we are connected by lightcable, then these images must have travelled at the speed of light. Perhaps that's too fast for something to remember. That night we were sitting at the table after dinner, chatting about the past. I asked them what do you do in university. My mom said in our time we had nothing to do so calligraphy was our time-passing, only except Sunday.
Why Sunday?
Because Sunday was a social dancing night.
Social dancing? Do you know how to do social dance?
Yes, she answered proudly.
Can you show me please?
The CD was playing Debussy's Rêverie. She laughed with shyness and pulled my father's hand. They went to the center of the living room. The light there was off so they looked a bit blurry from the dining room. They held each other and moved slowly.
Wet, Foggy and Green-dark Hills & 潮湿的，有雾的，暗得发绿的山岚
Photo credits: Mattia Pajè