A Tale of Two States (II)
枯榮 （二）
Oil, acrylic, sunflower seeds (in resin), sand, cement, plaster, paper, ash, bronze, iron, and crayon on canvas
Diptych,120 × 120 cm each, 2023–25
“A land without a people for a people without a land.”
— Zionist slogan
A Tale of Two States II (detail) 枯
Dec 10, 2023
Starting over with “A Tale of Two States”, to tell his story.
Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian poet, writer, and literature professor, was killed three days ago by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. Just last month, he posted this poem:
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made,
flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale.
A Tale of Two States II (detail) 榮
Dec 25
The Sophists
“It doesn’t matter if justice is on your side. You have to depict your position as just.” –– Benjamin Netanyahu
In a report titled “The Israel Project’s 2009 – Global Language Dictionary,” Israeli spin doctor Frank Luntz wrote that to turn Israel “from bully to victim,” “the fight is over ideology–––not land; terror–––not territory.”
The sophists ––– what matters is not truth but rhetoric.
Postmodern art ––– what matters is not the work but the rhetoric.
What is missing here? The intrinsic value. What is the intrinsic value of Art?
Dec 29
A surgeon in Gaza had to amputate his own child's limb without anesthetics, only to watch her die in excruciating pain. Earlier, a video showed a little boy screaming Quranic verses during surgery. UNICEF reports that since October 7, about 1,000 children in Gaza have had limbs amputated without anesthesia. Now, as they seek shelter from the raining bombs and bullets, they are left to grapple with cold, thirst, hunger, disease, and the desolation of their shattered world.
I hope that the three children I’ve painted for the “Tale” had already “left in a blaze—–and bid no one farewell, not even to their flesh, not even to themselves.” It’s too cruel to survive.
Jan 11–12, 2024
War on Narrative
In The Hague, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) opened with South Africa accusing Israel—–a state built on the claim of surviving genocide—–of committing genocide.
The South African delegation presented an extremely compelling and heart-wrenching case, though most UK media, including the BBC, refused to broadcast it. The next day, the Israeli court response was covered everywhere.
Jan 26
The ICJ ruling. 公道自在人心
Feb 1, 2024
Every time a painting nears completion, disappointment quietly creeps in. Only when I am working do I feel truly myself. In life, with other people, sincerity is so difficult. Art is more real than life.
But what, then, is Art? I begin each work full of hope, convinced that this time I might catch it; yet by the end, it has always slipped away.
Maybe Art is something I can never fully fathom. Maybe I can only approach it indirectly—not through abstraction, but by analogy.
Feb 2
Not through Abstraction, But by Analogy
During the early weeks of the war in Gaza, I was in southern France. Sunbathing on the Côte d’Azur, I watched the massacre unfold across the sea, live on my phone. Out of habit, I visited the Musée Matisse, Musée Chagall, Musée Picasso, Fondation Maeght, and others. The modernist masters worked painstakingly to abstract form in pursuit of a childlike naïveté. But this time, set against war and the sea, their “masterpieces” suddenly felt too light.
Since October 7, geopolitical and moral boundaries seem to have shifted, and with them, my own understanding of Art. I had never before contemplated the moral dimension of Art. I grew up in mainland China, where decades of rigid ideological propaganda, moral hyperbole, and hypocrisy accustomed people to a gulf between words and deeds, fostering a pragmatic, sometimes cynical worldview. Language and art became political instruments: formulaic, bombastic, hollow—sentimentality by rote. Inevitably, I recoiled in the opposite direction, believing that beauty transcends good and evil, and that Art should exist for its own sake. In my work, nothing frightened me more than sentimentality, especially moral sentimentality.
And yet, the war in Gaza has opened something within me. For the first time, I witnessed what I can only call “moral beauty” in a human soul. Brilliant intellectuals—Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Norman Finkelstein, and Ilan Pappé—along with several remarkable journalists, have seen more evil and corruption than most. All have paid a personal price for holding to their principles, yet they have retained their integrity and moral courage. They have not become cynical or despairing, but have remained committed to seeking truth and doing good.
In them, I finally glimpsed what it means to be a 君子 (junzi, the noble or ideal man)—“knowing it to be impossible, yet doing it nonetheless 知其不可而为之.” Although the Confucian idea of junzi has been extolled in Chinese education for over two millennia, I had never truly encountered one until now—perhaps because I was blind, perhaps because my surroundings were too utilitarian. There was something sublime in the souls of these men. What I felt on seeing them was almost akin to what I felt before the Parthenon sculptures, when they brought tears to my eyes.
For the first time, I began to ponder truth, goodness, and beauty—and the relationship between Art and morality.
