My thesis during the undergraduate program 2013.
Ever since moving to Beijing for university, my life gradually became more complex, and my anxieties grew increasingly overwhelming. Under the weight of this pressure, I began to long for those early mornings from the past, when the sky was still dim with dawn. I would sit quietly by my bed, listening to the murmur of the earth outside the window until I dissolved into that sound itself, experiencing a quiet lightness and subtle joy.
Driven by a desire to return to that state, I began searching for answers in philosophy and religious texts. At the same time, I began learning flamenco dance as a way to release emotional tension. These experiences ultimately led to the creation of my graduation project, Lotus Blossom.
In this work, the sound of a singing bowl emerges from silence, and language begins to arise from that vibration, continuously manifesting throughout the universe. Yet symbolic and referential language gradually fragments continuous experience, solidifying the fluidity of reality and producing binary oppositions and hierarchical structures. Interwoven with this process is flamenco dance, in which the obstruction and struggle of embodied experience within symbolic structures are transformed into a distinctive rhythm and movement.
As language condenses into a surging vortex, the dance is likewise driven toward its climax. Finally, the drumbeat abruptly ceases, and everything comes to a halt.
As Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” When the tide of linguistic symbols recedes, the world of distinctions collapses with it. In the dancer's eyes, the world returns to a field of white symbolizing a meditative state beyond conceptual thought. In this moment, worldly afflictions lose the causal structures upon which they depend and fall into suspension.