Coal & Ash Drawings
Tang Xianzu – Coal Portrait
Weight settles into a dark trace
Caption：
EN: Coal dust on rice paper, unframed. A portrait of Tang Xianzu — Shakespeare of the East — drawn with the material memory of my hometown.
EN:
This work merges portraiture, material research, and identity inquiry. Using coal dust from my hometown in Jiangxi — a region historically rich in both coal and classical Chinese culture — I draw the face of Tang Xianzu, the playwright often called the “Shakespeare of the East.”
Here, medium and subject are inseparable: coal is not merely a pigment but a carrier of geological and cultural memory. The choice of Tang Xianzu is also biographical: he and I share the same province, and his plays (The Peony Pavilion, The Purple Hairpin) were my earliest encounters with poetic tragedy.
Rather than functioning as a commemorative portrait, the work is part of a performative process — the dust is scattered, fixed, and allowed to leave residue on the paper edges, acknowledging its material instability. Displaying it unframed, with particles loose and vulnerable to air, makes the piece hover between drawing and time-based work.
This is simultaneously a homage and an experiment: an attempt to write myself into a longer literary and geological lineage, letting the medium carry both the weight of history and the ephemerality of a breath.
CN:
