What I mean here by wild ambition is a heart especially good at leaping freely through worlds of make-believe. It is, of course, also a grand desire, but in the cracks of that desire hides a bit of wild delight, sizzling.

A long, long time ago, to answer a question, someone dragged out a whole universe, the way you make up one lie and then must keep patching it, on and on, to fit its shape. The question was: why is this world around us the way it is? Myths or fairy tales, when the telling gets muddled, wrap up in a hurry and pull out another story. A long, long time after, there are questions with no answers and answers full of questions everywhere, and religion and science, too, have their times when they drag on and can’t find an ending, while their voices have already gone hoarse from the telling.

Stories and storytellers have never disappeared. The wonderful thing is, sometimes you don’t get the story I tell, and my story just happens not to be for you. That counts as a kind of unspoken understanding, too.

Over the past two or three years, Tang Chao has come across many landscapes on his travels. He is still fascinated by the image as a system of seeing, and by its relation to the world outside and the world within. Many images from memory have surfaced as well, and under the brush’s repeated stroking they have become more certain than the memories themselves. The opening of a comic book lost by an unknown author, scenes seen or imagined, and classic images from art history are expanded or tampered with on equal terms, forking along their own storylines and putting out branches.

The scenes he paints often seem to carry some impurities: a little reflected light, a few blurred shadows, black specks or colored dots drifting by. They look like the visual interference that appears when the retina is tired or not working right, or like a thin film that emotion and time have laid over the image. These impurities in the landscape, like the seemingly off-topic dialogue in a story, are important details of real experience.

Stitch by stitch, brick by brick, he made different sets and puppets, and in these miniature scenes he lit, shot, moved the camera and directed. In the mood of a stop-motion fairy tale, retro and fantastical at once, time seems to slow down with it. Sometimes we simply can’t tell which came first, the world or the story.

On an unfinished comic book
Humans and gods fight one more big battle, a muscle man gets caught up in a squabble
Vimalakīrti, come from Abhirati, says mountains and rivers are all illusions of the mind
Plants storm the heart
Turpentine runs, then blows a few bubbles

Bodies, objects, flowers and grass, animals and fantasies all have different boiling points
The one who paints says drawing from life is just the hand’s shadow chasing the pen’s tail like a dog
Lies are as precious as the hair on a cheap goat-hair brush
While the puppets’ story in the small room is still being edited
A hedgehog dressed up as a penguin sneaks into the hymn

In wild watercress’s memory, summers of swimming in the river, and a ghost no longer see-through
In the mountains and mists, the fallen-leaf meadows of Dunhuang and the Greater Khingan Range
The will of the spirits grows unusually lush
Seurat’s circus is taken over by a black skeleton figure, a straw-hat figure and a vase figure
Once a fruit starts to rot, it rots all the way
Once a bloodline goes bad, it goes bad all the way

The lucky one meets a lucky death
A plane takes off
The stars dim one by one
Eyelids take back all the landscapes

These stories aren’t mine. I heard them from someone else.

By Zhao Xinxin