Tang Xianzu – Coal Portrait

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:
这件作品结合了肖像、材料研究和身份探寻。我使用江西家乡出产的煤炭——一种承载地质与文化记忆的材料——在宣纸上绘制汤显祖的面孔，他被称为“东方的莎士比亚”。

在这里，媒介与题材不可分割：煤炭不仅是颜料，也是历史的载体。选择汤显祖具有自传性意义：他与我同省，他的《牡丹亭》《紫钗记》是我最早接触的诗意悲剧。

作品并非纪念性肖像，而是表演性过程的一部分——煤炭粉末被散落、固定，又在纸面边缘留下不稳定的痕迹，承认它的物质易逝性。作品被无框展示，让粉末暴露在空气里，使其介于绘画与时间性作品之间。

这既是致敬，也是实验：一种把自己写入更长文化和地质谱系的尝试，让媒介同时承载历史的重量与呼吸的轻盈。