Everyone hides a dream in the deepest heart and every dream dreams to come true. Amongst, some run after and others just wait. From time to time dreams fail expectations. Although stories that “stay by a stump waiting for more hares” and “idly poke a stick in the mud which grows into a tree to shade you” are far from fabrication. It is best for one to get down working and ask for no harvest.

All alone, Wang Huaxiang devotes fully to painting whatever the end may be, leaving himself on the way. Philosophers always warn people not to hurry to the end considering its double manifold of existence and annihilation. As is put by Heidegger, the only destined end for a man is death.

A man living towards death should care about process which is more energetic and phenomenologically true than the end. Wang’s interest in truth is beyond aesthetics and morality, who dissect himself to face the inner true self. Nietzsche told us that truth is not correlated with virtue and even less with beauty. We are used to view the world with aesthetic or moral concepts regardless of the fact that art is beyond concept. We feel dazzled when suddenly encountering the truth, analogous to that in Plato’s Cave: a slave trapped in a cave takes the shadows on the cave wall as reality. After he is freed from the cave and walks in the sun light, the first sight of the reality makes him dazzled. Wang’s works would dazzle us but help us to overcome the feeling as well.
- Peng Feng

*image (left)
Wang Huaxiang,
Oh Series No.2, 2013
Oil on canvas, 110x80cm
courtesy of the artist