In the blink of an eye, more than forty years have passed, and now I have entered the age of knowing destiny.
My skin is very pale. No one would imagine that the reason for this whiteness is vitiligo. Since my teenage years, it once spread across my body like the mottled shadows of a summer canopy of leaves, and it also cast a shadow over my heart—until, eventually, all those patches disappeared.
Now, those who know me well do not ask. Those who do not know me say, “Your whiteness is really unusual.”
I only smile.
It is a layer of Xuan paper between me and the world.
My only relative in this world is my elder brother, but he lives in another world—the world of schizophrenia. When I visit him, it feels like looking at a landscape through frosted glass. On the other side of the glass, mountains are no longer mountains, and waters are no longer waters.
This made me understand one thing very early: what we call “normal” is nothing more than a thin sheet of paper. Once it is pierced, everyone has their own mountains and rivers.
And so I paint.
I do not follow what is written in books. I do not follow what teachers are supposed to teach.
I soak the paper, fold it, tear it open, and then allow color to sink into it again and again.
Some people say this is nonsense. I say no—
Creases are not things to be smoothed away.
Creases are roads, textures, the original form of life itself.
Every morning, I look at the Xuan paper as if I were looking at my own face, wrinkled by time.
Then I begin to “work”—
I continue dyeing yesterday’s creases deeper. I guide the accidentally spilled ink into streams. I plant forests inside the broken cracks.
People often ask me: What is art?
For me, art is the lifelong practice of my soul—
to gather the fragments of life, bind them together, color them, and give them a new radiance.
So when you look at my paintings, you are not looking at what mountains or waters I have painted. You are looking at how a fifty-three-year-old man, standing alone in the world, has taken the skin made pale by vitiligo, the mist that will not disperse from his brother’s eyes, and the turbulence of half a lifetime, and laid them down layer by layer into a landscape one can enter.
I founded "Senxiangism" because my life itself is a "Senxiang":
first crumpled by fate,
then, through half a lifetime, slowly unfolded into mountains and rivers of my own.