Weekly record highlights：
- Art work and the Lion King
- White Cube Exhibition: David Altmejd
- Site of research: Fool’s Journey
- Anish Kapoor: Breathing Blue
Art work and the Lion King
This week I went to see the Lion King musical. Even if the plot is familiar, it is still very moving when presented in front of me in a stage presentation. Especially when I saw the actors wearing the lion’s headdress as a symbol of kingship, topless and in costumes full of totemic elements. I was suddenly reminded of my own work on life and nurture ——Mother and Child.
The elements encompass the fish totem, a symbol of fertility worship, in the sphinx-faced fish basin of the Hanpo culture of the Chinese people；The fetus conceived under the dual guardianship of the mother’s golden ribs and the religious culture of the fish；The metaphor of reproduction, etc.
The contrast between gold and blue represents a seemingly opposing fusion, showing the coexistence of the primordial power and divine gentleness of maternal nurture.
When I heard the Lion King’s Circle of Life, these two pieces immediately came to mind. The wheat skin and voluptuous figure is the most beautiful image of a mother in my mind, its sense of rawness and strength revealing a healthy vitality. It is a combination of human beauty, maternal beauty and divine beauty. Life is connected, I think, and humans seem to be watching the story of the lion, but none of them are out of this circle of life, in awe of life and nature.
White Cube Exhibition: David Altmejd
The Hare is the presiding spirit of the exhibition, whom Altmejd recognises as the Jungian archetype of the Trickster. According to Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, our ancestral memories are represented by certain universal themes and roles which appear throughout our literature, art and dreams, and these archetypes can explain our psychology. Trickster is irrational and capricious, a prankster and shapeshifter.(2022-2023)
In my perception, this collective subconscious is not as natural as different groups of monkeys learning one way to eat one food. It requires acquired indoctrination or guidance. This fleshing out of the image of the prankster and the transsexual rather than a use of a subconscious concept is also an emphasis on the concreteness of this concept.
“We accept it for what it is in the rabbit’s presidency.”
Site of research: Fool’s Journey
Two friends came to my house for a visit and one of them brought tarot cards. We talked after dinner until 3am, as if we had lost track of time. It was also on this day that I learnt about the so-called The Fool’s Journey.
The Fool stands for each of us as we begin our journey of life. He is a fool because only a simple soul has the innocent faith to undertake such a journey with all its hazards and pain.At the start of his trip, the Fool is a newborn – fresh, open and spontaneous.
He will undergo a series of dilemmas, adventures and challenges to be reborn and eventually reenter the World. After the process，His false, ego-self has been shed, allowing his radiant, true self to manifest. He has discovered that joy, not fear, is at life’s center.The Fool feels absolved. He forgives himself and others, knowing that his real self is pure and good. He may regret past mistakes, but he knows they were due to his ignorance of his true nature. He feels cleansed and refreshed, ready to start anew.He has integrated all the disparate parts of himself and achieved wholeness. He has reached a new level of happiness and fulfillment.Through perseverance and honesty, he reestablished the spontaneous courage that first impelled him on his search for Self, but now he is fully aware of his place in the world. This cycle is over, but, the Fool will never stop growing. Soon he will be ready to begin a new journey that will lead him to ever greater levels of understanding.
I know that I am the fool, constantly aware of my folly as I grow up, but also constantly facing reinvention and gladly accepting the baptism of life. The fool’s journey begins with the end like the Ouroboros, and like the Yin and the Yang that are mutually exclusive, I realise that there are many similarities between East and West, whether in philosophy, metaphysics or even the occult. How is this not another manifestation of the collective subconscious?
Anish Kapoor: Breathing Blue
Anish Kapoor is an artist I really like, I know him for his giant crimson wax installations and mirrored sculptures. When I saw this set of his blue etching works, I couldn’t help but confirm if this was the same artist.
When I saw the Breathing Blue, I dared to breathe only softly for fear of disturbing the blue creature in front of me: it was silent, perhaps sleeping, perhaps watching, with a spiritual life.
It drew me deeply into a mysterious and quiet world, very different from the other works I had previously known by Kapoor, and showed me even more the versatility of the artist, and made me love the magic of blue even more deeply.