Dowsing and Earth Spirit

Starting from the artist’s journey of tracing back to the origins, returning to the region of childhood growth thirty years later. There is a national park inside an industrial city. The park itself is a mountain formed during an orogenic movement in the late Pleistocene. Hunched coral reefs under the sea later became lime- based earth. Rugged and sharp coral stones spread all over the earth’s surface. Due to extended compression, rises, folds, faults and joints appeared among rock strata, creating karst topography. Subterranean streams of rain eroded the terrain and groundwater flowed out through crevices among rocks and became water springs. A series of geologic mutations inspire the artist to investigate relations between water and modernity, body and society. Man’s imagination of nature and desire to control it are strongly inscribed onto water which is a part of the material culture of modernity.

In “Dowsing and Earth Spirit”, an imagined narrative line is conceived, where the seeker of water’s figure transforms into the soul winding around the waterways in the imagery, guiding the viewer to visit special scenes around the national park: stalactite Guanyin statues, shell mound relics and waters of sulphide springs which represent multiple natural and artificial spaces. Each space is linked to one another through imperceptible interactions which compose the network existing among all things. Meanwhile, the artist roams among memory, consciousness, experience and feedback, like in an “unfinished dialogue” with himself.