We Are All from Fragments that Have Been on the Way for a Long Time

Text / Zhang Xumin

The Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, in his poem Hommages, employs the image of “fragments that have been on the way for a long time” as a metaphor for humanity’s drifting and convergence across time and space — through the long voyage, we are both the dust of history and the sparks of the future. In the vast existence of the universe, humankind is at once nature’s rebel and its eternal prisoner; our lives scatter like fragments across different dimensions — material, spiritual, and virtual — yet shine with undying brilliance in the sacred hymn of art.

The theme “fragments that have been on the way for a long time” carries a multiplicity of spiritual resonances. On one hand, the modernization of civilization continuously divides the physical space between nature and the self. The concrete jungle of industrialization has rendered humanity increasingly lost within the labyrinthine spectacle of modern systems. The ambition to conquer and nature’s inevitable retaliation have become the ultimate conflict of the postmodern world, while the longing for truth, goodness, and beauty lies in quiet redemption, like a Sunken Stone. On the other hand, though the blaze of the digital revolution seems to illuminate the path of human civilization, the technological surge — the Tongues of Fire — has seared binary scars into the very texture of society, corroding our emotional and perceptual realities. What once were vivid memories of life are now quantified into symbolic fragments and virtual codes, where silence echoes the solitude of unanswered existence.

Indeed, the creation of water-based woodblock is itself a form of “ on the way.” The grain of the wood bears the traces of time; the depth of carving embodies both resistance and formation; and the ink’s permeation becomes a metaphor for the diffusion and condensation of vitality. The multiplicity of the watercolor printmaking, the transience of its watery traces, and the contingency of the knife’s incisions recall the poetic lines —

“Inscriptions on church bells

and proverbs written across saints

and many-thousand-year-old seeds.”

Though they carry the weight of human memory, they cannot escape the silent erosion of time. With the knife as his pen, the artist interlaces the imprints of civilization at the threshold between wood and paper — a gesture that is both a retrospective of tradition and a prophecy of the future.

As ubiquitous digital interfaces blur the boundary between the real and the illusory, we are compelled to confront a series of embodied predicaments — the fluidity of individual identity, the erosion of collective memory, the alienation of subjectivity, and the suspension of attention. Together, these evoke a posthuman condition that is increasingly mobile, unstable, and fragmented. When human civilization has trekked for so long through both physical and virtual realms, can fragments — as traces of existence and metaphors of connection — also become the possibility of rebirth? In facing such crises, the spirit of water-based woodblock offers a wisdom of integration amid dispersion, a resolve for simplicity born of depth. Within its restrained endurance and poetic freedom lies an illumination of the enduring vitality of Eastern philosophy. Thus, every woodblock and every printed trace in the process of watercolor printmaking becomes not only a physical incision but also a spiritual inscription. In recognizing the fractured nature of postmodern life, watermark printing transcends its traditional visual domain to confront the philosophical question of human existence itself — aspiring, through the affirmative power of artistic practice, toward an awareness and reconciliation beyond sameness.

From the early reproduction of religious imagery to the dissemination of secular texts and the cultivation of literati aesthetics, and onward into modern times, printmaking has continually sought the purity of its own artistic language. As an externalized manifestation of Eastern spirit, water-based woodblock has always maintained an open posture, thereby resonating with the sociocultural production of each historical phase. This exhibition takes contemporary young artists’ watercolor printmaking works as its visual medium, unfolding through a sequential constellation of metaphors — Sunken Stone, Tongues of Fire, and Elegy for Love — forming a progressive narrative. Together, they compose a lyrical meditation on the condition of human existence today. Through the ritualistic essence unique to watermark printing, the exhibition further poses the question: amid the evolution of civilization — in our conquest of nature, our indulgence in technology, and our pursuit of the unknown — how might humanity, in its fragmented state, forge a consciousness of eternity?