I have never been satisfied with any ready-made answer—whether the brush-and-ink laws of the ancients, or the value logic of contemporary society. They are all too orderly, too obedient, too secure. And art has never belonged to security. I have deconstructed tradition, and I have deconstructed myself.
More than fifty years of training in brush and ink have allowed me to see clearly the cage of form. People worship “ancient methods,” yet they have long forgotten that the root of brush and ink lies in the heart, not in the hand. And so I overturned those reproducible paradigms, leaving only water, paper, breath, and the state of mind in the present moment. I have also seen through the illusions of traffic, labels, and identity. They have nothing to do with art. Art does not need to be packaged; it only needs to be lived out honestly.
Yet when I pushed everything down, what remained within me was not freedom, but emptiness. I came to understand that only from that emptiness could a new order of life be reconstructed. And so I began to paint "Senxiang".
**Senxiangism** is not a style, but a way of existing.
It is born from the mutual generation among nature, material, and the soul. Each painting is an act of incubation. I am merely a midwife, allowing water, paper, pigment, and time to grow by themselves. It is not designed by me; it comes into being naturally through my hands.
I know that all aesthetic systems in this world will eventually collapse.
Yet I still choose to paint within that collapse.
Because creation is my only way of resisting nothingness.
When all meaning fails, only the act itself remains as meaning.
I no longer seek to paint “beautiful” landscapes.
What I want to paint is the breathing of life, the trembling of existence, the echo of the void.
I want to paint a field that makes people feel both peaceful and unsettled, as if standing before the dissolution of all things, one could still sense the final light of life.
Perhaps my paintings are not merely landscapes.
They are the traces of my struggle with time.
They are the records of my dialogue with the void.
They are a "Senxiang" completed with the entirety of my life—
a story about existence, destruction, and rebirth.
I have already fastened my sword at my side.
At this moment, I choose to turn around, face the realm where no one has gone, and walk on alone with absolute resolve.