Cover Image

31°25'24.45"N, 24°25'37.01"W

(faulty google earth coordinates of Atlantis)
watercolor on paper
162 x 112 cm
2018

Inspired by the ancient Chinese mystical book The Book of Mountains and Seas (around 4 century BC) which abounds with documentations of locations and creatures whose existence cannot be certified today, the painting places the metaphysical elements – mountains, rivers, pagoda, teeth, nebula on the same map with the related scale broken. To address the interrelatedness and interdependence of these elements and their respective symbolic allusions, the painting sets its perspective from the west and the east: modern science presented people with a world made of the same particles, thus making us no difference from any other things but all star dust, which is the idea rooted in eastern wisdom that there is not the Self and the Other, but the unification of both. The rivers, resembling veins, suggesting that humans lives in and contains this otherworldly world at the same time.

The two signs on top of the watercolour simplifies the underlying idea with the top being da Vinci’s Vitruvian man and the below being Mandala in Buddhism. The similarity and the difference address the interdependent progress of western and eastern history. They are made of the same squares and circles but different as well.