I. After many trials, it remains the same that my whole being will be excited whenever present Cai Xiaohua’s paintings are. Nothing physical or emotional.

　　Nothing happened actually. All is silent, nothing moves, but my whole being is exceptionally excited, as if an electron gets excited into another level of its energy. Excited state.

　　The art of Cai Xiaohua leads me into an excited state. To try to describe this exceptional experience is futile. I’ll give it a try nevertheless, with words being contingent; the process, the end to itself.

　　It’s rather a phenomenon than an experience of this excited state. Some phenomena call for different viewpoints to gain a better understanding or inspire other interpretations.

　　II. Excited state one.

　　What makes the you at the present? I ask myself. This irreplaceable, time tested, much changed and about-to-change being of you. What are you, let alone who are you?

　　Bodily I’m not convinced that the I of my childhood is the same as the I of now. My body with all its flesh and blood has already disintegrated and replaced many a trillion time. Mentally I don’t understand a thing the I of my childhood would know and he won’t mine. So much has been forgotten; have I really been him? Is he still a part of me?

　　If the I of the past has gone, will I still be when the I of the future dies? The day when I dies, is it an end or a beginning? What would I become of? Will he still be considered me? How much of me in him would be counted as a beginning? How much of him in me would be counted as a continuation?

　　Looking at Cai Xiahua’s paintings, I found myself posing questions to myself, about you, me, him, about memories, time, about death.

　　III.Viewpoint one, about time, the time of paintings.

　　Paintings are static by nature. They depict a dynamic world around. Regarding this seemingly contradicting feature of paintings, John Berger presented his arguments as follows (‘Painting and time’: first published in New Society, 27 September 1979). Paintings don’t lend themselves as “records” of time, such as that of photography, for the moment depicted in paintings is never really existed. Informed by painter’s creative experience, Berger argues that painters foresee the moment when the paintings will be looked at. In this way paintings are prophecies, “prophecies received from the past, prophecies about what the spectator is seeing in front of the painting at that moment. Some prophecies are quickly exhausted– the painting loses its address; others continue.”

　　But prophecies are inadequate to explain the staying power of paintings to keep us interested. At best they only presume that paintings will have this power. Berger points out timelessness, as infiltrated in paintings, makes them a retreat and ultimate appeal. “The language of pictorial art, because it was static, became the language of such timelessness. Yet what it spoke about — unlike geometry — was the sensuous, the particular and the ephemeral. Its mediation between

　　the realm of the timeless and the visible and tangible was more total and poignant than that of any other art. Hence its iconic function, and special power.”

　　Paintings, with their mediating of the timeless and the ephemeral, sustain their mystery. However, by the mid nineteenth century, with the dominance of European capitalism and Darwinian evolutionary view of history, man considered himself freed and time began to accelerate. No more timelessness. Now is everything and everything is to be swept away. No more timelessness in paintings. “The ephemeral has become the sole category of time. Banalized by pragmatism and consumerism, the ephemeral was excluded from abstract art, or fetishized as short- lived fashion in pop art and its derivatives. The ephemeral, no longer appealing to the timeless, becomes as trivial and instant as the fashionable.”

　　Berger’s analysis shows the ineluctable fate of pictorial art under the ideology of industrial capitalism. After examining excited state one of mine, this is not what Cai Xiaohua’s art leads to, not the glittering wasteland of digital information, not the fleeting sense of tastes, not the talking heads and big brothers.

　　IV. Excited state two.

　　Spring green with the burgeoning of mountains, flourishing taste of flowers and grass, we walk into the woods deep and haphazard.

　　Summer hot with the new sun in a new town, undecided hearts simmer with slim hopes by the almost parched ponds in the park.

　　Autumn of monotone sea and sky, the humidity tickles your flowering smiles and together we agitate the impatient rice paddies of gold.

　　Winter of grey and an ancient city, addictive are the dust and smog of the world, lighted with one cigarette after another, whose sight blighted, whose return in sight.

　　V. Viewpoint two, about presence and absence.

　　In front of the art of Cai Xiaohua, I’ve considered the existence of dark matter and said his art “could be understood as a search for what is beyond the visible, a manifestation of dark matter.”

　　Berger also talks about “visible” and “invisible.” After contemplating on painting and time, he continues with the question of space, juxtaposing the pair of “visible” and “invisible” with that of “presence” and “absence” (‘The place of painting’: fist published in New Society, 7 October 1982).

　　“To be visible is to be present: to be absent is to be invisible.” Following this dialectic, Berger explores the space and paintings. As long as there is audience, paintings will have to deal with outside and interior, will have to bring in the boundless of the outside world within their frame. What is brought in is always far and absent. This basic conflict pitches man at a dilemma, whereas the visible is the main and most important way we know the world, whereas the visible brings us the world, it also takes that world away, reminding us of the exclusion.

　　Man has to develop an inner eye “which retains, and assembles and arranges as if an interior, as if what has been seen will be forever partly protected against the ambush of space, which is absence.” Is this conflict everlasting? The space in paintings is only as such? There are more to it; there are revelations, where we witness the mystery of the visible coming into being, citing Genesis: “Let there be light: and there was light.”

　　This mystery is most readily experienced in natural beauty; such beauty is always experienced as a form of revelation. “At the moment of revelation when appearance and meaning become identical, the space of physics and the seer’s inner space coincide: momentarily and exceptionally she or he achieves an equality with the visible. To lose all sense of exclusion; to be at the centre.”

　　In his view, the outside world is a threat to us, separating and marginalizing our existence as men, while the space of paintings provides a shelter, a refuge. However, after examining the excited state two of mine, this is not what the art of Cai Xiaohua reveals to me; rather it excites me.

　　Hence, I must retrace the path toiled by Cai Xiaohua, to further explain my excited states. Let’s begin by returning to “Breathing.”

　　VI. Without a doubt, the series work of “Breathing” by Cai Xiaohua excites me the most.

　　You come to face it, you walk around it, you stay and you leave. Once there’s eye contact, you are instantly bonded with “Breathing,” as if both of you fall on a spider’s web, both of you free to roam, both of you hunter and the hunted.

　　On this web, you are intimately aware of each and every move, breath, made by your counterpart. You are surprised by how much and well you know about him, in the past, present and future, as to man’s condition and the state of things. It’s such a wide wide web but you don’t feel it far: it’s always by your side.

　　Forgetting hunting and being hunted, you breathe in and out, as always; forgetting looking and being looked, you breathe in and out, with or without effort; forgetting presence and absence, you find out that you are the web and there’s no spider in sight; forgetting the spider and the

　　web, you are back with Cai Xiaohua’s “Breathing.”

　　Excited state three.

　　Simultaneously it occurs to you, at the best, it’s just a canvas.

　　On the canvas, from another angle, it’s just a hue; from another angle, it’s more than a hue, and not that one you thought you saw. From another distance, it’s just a shape; from another distance, it’s more than a shape, the old one giving form to another, formless. After looking at it for then seconds, it’s a combination of dots; after looking at it for ten minutes, the combined dots grow and grow.

　　Simultaneously it occurs to you, at the best, it’s but a canvas of a time- space, a living cosmo. And out of it’ s living vitality, other living cosmos are excited into being.

　　VII. Viewpoint three.

　　The Diamond Sutra, chapter eighteen, contemplating the oneness of everything: “neither the past, the present nor the future mind can be found.” What is called mind is not the true mind. In another word, our sense of time and space is linear: distance of near and far, sequence of before and after. In truth, the real essence of time and space is that this point of time is every time and this point of space is every space. “Now” and “every” are both present and absent, the non-duality of reality.

　　VIII. Let us get to the point before Viewpoint three. And we understand, the art of Cai Xiaohua is of non-duality: the non-duality of mind and matter, of time and space.

　　While talked about “Breathing,” Cai Xiaohua said: “Painting nowadays has blended in my life, become part of my life, been a state of my breathing. This state of breathing expands and continues along with my work “Breathing,” telling a state of being of mine.”

　　Creation and work are one of the same. The non-duality of life and art.

　　In this space-time, now is forever, here is everywhere, echoing the basic relation between man and universe, as exemplified in the cultural tradition of the East, and differentiating from the conflict and struggle between man and nature, as exemplified in consumerism since western industrial revolution and protestant ideology.

　　Thus we see ephemera living and dying and living in silence. Timelessness doesn’t come from the tension and conflict between the static picture and the dynamic world, but an evolving living space- time. Thus we see boundless flow in the western picture frame of “Breathing,” infinitely continuous and with a boundary. Or not, it’s beyond contemplation.

　　For we have never been excluded from the world. We are part of the world; we are all of the world. The visible could be absent, the presence could be invisible. Hence the existence of dark matter and its relation with the art of Cai Xiaohua. ‘Dark Matter,’ viewpoint four.

　　IX. Viewpoint five.

　　Hsieh Ho’s ‘Classifications of painters’: “First, Spirit Resonance which means vitality; second, Bone Method which is (a way of) using the brush; third, Correspondence to the Object which means the depicting of forms; fourth, Suitability to Type which has to do with the laying on of colours; fifth, Division and Planning, ie. Placing and Arrangement; sixth, Transmission by Copying, that is to say the copying of models.”

　　His first principle of “qi yun sheng dong” is the most important and open to interpretation. However, the language is elusive to modern ear. Most of the interpretations are too aesthetical.

　　Qi and yun are energies. The essence of art and its real value are at the production of the art, the process by which artists create work and the intensity and level of energy it achieves. Works of art are the crystallization and formation of artists’ creative energies, which enable the transmission and dissemination of bio information to another time, space and living being. A work of art is an object and beyond object, an example of non-duality, as matter of being particle and wave at the same time. Great works of art exhibit their own fields of energy, their own life force, their own cosmo, their own space-time. And they radiate. And we got excited in this field of energy. We synchronize.

　　Another feature of great fields of energy could be seen in “Breathing”: temperature approaching absolute zero. All the intense or light or heavy colors but you don’t feel the heat, instead the ever coolness (related to “aura” but not to be equated with coldness).

　　In the physical world, as temperature approaching absolute zero, entropy decreases. Matter reveals itself to be ever more astonishing. Particles react to other particles at great distance. Particles react as if they are one, one “superatom.”

　　It’s nearly impossible to reach absolute zero, which requires tremendous work. In the art of Cai Xiaohua, tremendous efforts and focus have been bestowed. As a consequence he pushes his whole being to absolute zero, sealed in a thin veil of canvas, creating a vibrant energy field of “qi” and “yun.” Few have achieved such level of energy in contemporary Chinese art.

　　X. Should you ask, how to discern a work of art possessing energy and of what level of energy? How are we to get excited by it? This is still a mystery; not even the language of science could decipher. Our writing shall stop right here and now.