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Feng Yan is both a writer and a visual artist. As a creator, Feng Yan freely moves between the two widely disparate mediums of literature and photography, while revealing the inner connections between their respective languages and techniques so that these two texts can illuminate and interpret each other, and remain together within the broader artistic space. In the infinite divisions of time and space, the world is paradoxically experienced and grasped. This is the most straightforward perception of Feng Yan’s works. Feng Yan does not attempt to bring time to a stop, nor to fix space in place, but instead to use words and images as a probe through which to explore this world, giving him a powerful, broad, and vivid foundation and perspective to guide the viewer from objectivity to subjective observer. Here, the arrow does not fly for the target’s sake, and the tortoise moves forward, not to defeat the hare. They have the potential to become the protagonist, taking on their own meaning, time, and space. When relieved from teleological cognitive methodology, the world has the opportunity to reveal a greater truth.
Collapsed Reality
The human world is constantly being distorted by goals and desires. The space of human consciousness is filled with incompatible, code-violating architecture. Feng Yan’s writings and images exert exacting control over time and behavior in order to present these distortions and to expose people’s delusional constructs about the outside world. This is the moment of alarm provided by Feng Yan, a super-sensory presentation of vision, action, spatial and material properties to reach a rift in reality. But Feng Yan did not drift into the fantastical or surreal. The text formed by his words and images points in a unified direction, being the probing of existence in reality, followed by precise applications of drugs to elicit self-doubt and astonishment within the recipient, altering their world and leading them to perceive themselves and the outside world anew, and to rebuild and reconnect into a total existence. In fictional writings and faithful images, the reality seen in ordinary perspectives is shattered. Figures and scenarios undergo metamorphosis, waiting for an update to the viewer’s recognition. Next, the essence of reality will automatically emerge.
Will and Conduct
People imagine themselves becoming complete subjects, and attempt to overstep their place to become the masters of the world. Meanwhile, people ultimately admit the limitations of their understanding and imagine such things as order and gods in the world. In this way, gods and the order of the world can be objects of understanding and aspiration, in the faith that one day they will be reached. The ambition to become a subject has not dissipated. Human will and conduct constantly tangle and conflict with the imagined order of the world. The control of conduct and the construction of order thus become a will and power with a sense of form. Feng Yan’s works are clearly directed at these. Through the selection of methods and the devising of structures, Feng Yan uses his unique approach to turn these forms into tangible objects of examination. Behind will and conduct, through what logic and principles do power and order operate and become replaced?
Form and Emptiness
When the signified is emptiness, the signifier takes on a powerful infectiousness. Meaning may drift or disappear, but form gains subjectivity and meaning. Under the effects of magnification, re-magnification, expansion, and re-expansion, the content has been pulled apart and dissolved, the microscopic manifestation forcing a rebooting of the recipient’s conventional thinking, stripped of the conception of self, bringing renewal to their receptivity. Within a network of infinite connections, there is reflected a unified, overarching world. This is the effect of Feng Yan using his writings and images to convey his understanding of humanity. This effect is so pure and innocent that even though his writings and images do not emphasize a unique style or form, they are highly recognizable anyway, forming a Feng Yan-style aesthetic.
Non-Linear and Immaterial
Reading in itself is the dislocation of time. The tight interlocking of the rings of time gives rise to a new arrangement of time and space. Time must become an object that can be utilized, while vision must be removed from the matter it reflects to become a provider of conscious energy. Words and images must become an energy that can set off sparks and automatic motion, but there is no need for them to become objects of reverence. For Feng Yan, this is a necessity in literature, and a necessity in photography.
Illusion is the Most Real.
Silent Observation the Most Dangerous
Feng Yan’s works can bring people to swim in the great weight of the myriad things. They must escape from the comfort of life in air, and immerse their entire bodies in the boundless water to recognize the appearance and principles of the world anew, and act according to true intentions. Feng Yan has devised a choice for everyone: remain shut away forever in the emptiness touched by the senses, or fearlessly pick up the weight of life.
Changing and Unchanging Dimensions of History
The weighing of time and the accumulation of space have been called constructing history. This is an endeavor that transcends dimensions, one that people measure by the lengths of their lives. The opportunity to think about one’s own position and origins is a rare grace for anyone. In his written narrative, Feng Yan is rooted in the present. He makes action occur seemingly without end, and situations infinitely change, until the conventional reality comes under great pressure. Driven by instinct, the reader cannot help but look back on himself, waking up from the self-supposition of “nothing is happening” at the time of reading, and taking a skeptical, but not flustered, attitude to the reexamination of self, pondering “how does reality happen?” The boundaries between multiple dimensions thus unfold, and the individual establishes his connections to history.
This is the intervention and interference in the individual space by Feng Yan’s writing, and the influence that literature can exert on people. His images, on the other hand, follow behavioral logic over photographic logic. They present many randomly produced entries and outlets, and from the discoveries, entries, and returns from these points, reality moves forward in different dimensions. The resulting outcome is that these images cannot be placed within a single reality. The viewer can only enter and exit different space-times following the transitions between dimensions. At this moment, the flying bird is simultaneously still and in motion.
Outcomes Only
The light and warmth of the fire will eventually fade, leaving only remnants and traces as its outcomes. The new world will not be an ideal paradise. The eyes of the old world will see so many monuments left by vanity and will. Words and images are merely descriptions and presentations of the outcomes. There is no need for decoration or embellishment. If we always live in the outcome, then there will only be one kind of outcome. But if we resolve to accept all outcomes, then those outcomes will be infinitely rich. There is no need to search among the ruthlessly accumulating outcomes for that original cause. They are the cause in the here and now. The outcomes that are Feng Yan’s artworks will become the starting point for the reader and the viewer.
Epilogue
The beauty of misreading is in that each one is different. The differences between misreadings are what draw people in, and are opportunities to cross the boundaries between individual languages. Feng Yan’s works have established this reference, but what it can explain is up to the interpreter. Everyone hopes that the spiritual world constructed from the subjective could have the same substance of the physical world. At a time when the physical world is collapsing, this spiritual world has the opportunity to rise anew. If we read the physical world as nothing more than so much data, then that is all the more reason to preserve the unique, transdimensional data, like Feng Yan’s words and images.
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