Home ground: an area, locality, or subject with which one is intimately familiar: Dictionary.com
Starting from my story
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I was born in this city called Shenyang located in northeast China, and I have spent around 6 years there before I moved to Beijing, which is far away from my relatives. I can still remember I was crying with my grandmother on the street because we are leaving the home ground at the age of 6. The impressions for Shenyang is my grandparents, snow and cold, skewers.
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Then I have started the second journey of my life in my most familiar city: Beijing. I spent about 12 years living in this city, and this is the place where traditional Chinese aesthetics are planted in my heart. Every year when I travel back to Beijing I have to go visit the Forbidden City, I can feel some kind of mysterious connections to this land. The impression for Beijing is: politics, hot and dry, nobility, history, friends and parents.
For most people living in Beijing feel it is difficult for them to truly integrate into this city, nor can they feel that they are a member of this city since it is the capital of China, and it is not easy to survive in a high-consumption city. But, with my parents, I love this city.
In my second year of high school, I left home by my own and came to France for the first time. When I stood on the ground of a French airport, I did not feel the strangeness of a foreign country. On the contrary, when the heat wave hits my face, I look at the stains on the ground, and I only feel the sense of being down to earth. No matter which country we are in, as long as we are on the surface of the earth, it feels assured.
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Starting from 2015, I moved to Vancouver for education purposes, this is the first time I left my parents and tried to be independent. I’ve stayed here for 5 years, I’ll be here for another two years at least, so I define vancouver as my third hometown.
Answer to myself
Sometimes I get really confused, and I always question myself, where is my home? Literally, looking from my past experience, I feel like a duckweed floating between different cities and don’t know where to settle. In the mind of most Chinese people, a stable home should be achieved by having a fixed asset, but in my opinion, where emotional sustenance is the real home.
Mind mapping
Word in the center: Home ground
Second roll: Beijing, memories, relatives, love and simple, safe, familiar. intimate space
Third roll: emotional connections, cultural impression, nationality, blood relation, spiritual values, location, historical background
Forth roll: unity, universal, ancestors, originate, profound mystery, empathy, truth
In this mind map, a home ground is not talking about a specific location, or under a specific cultural settings. Based on what I have experenced through these years, it is trying to find the emotional connections between me as a person living in 2020, and the world, in other words, the earth where we are living in.
This planet has created human civilization, and because of this special geographical location, life and everything we have now arises, so what I want to express is the connection between me as a human being and the universe.
As we are experiencing now, we should have been sitting in a classroom together and discussing our home ground, but we are now together through the network, no matter how far we are, we are sharing experiences on the earth together.
Myth hypothesis
There are many different cultures on the earth, each country has its own story, but the similarities in these stories may support a new idea: maybe the stories we read in different cultures can build for us a whole, worldwide system of myths and stories.
Almost no one knows this mural locally, but when the Chinese see this mural, many people can call him Xing Tian. Legend has it that Xing Tian was a civil servant of Emperor Yan, good at music and handsome, he was originally a graceful gentleman. However, after the Yan Emperor was defeated by the Yellow Emperor, Xing Tian refused to accept him, and went to Chi You to fight back against the Yellow Emperor. However, Chi You was defeated by the Yellow Emperor and Xing Tian was captured alive. He refused to surrender, so Huang Di used Xuanyuan sword to chop off Xing Tian’s head, but Huang Di was worried that Xing Tian would be resurrected, so he destroyed his head.
The ancient Egyptians and Chinese had the same understanding of resurrection, and it required two conditions. First, the person who can be resurrected must have the blood of God and be the descendant of God. The ancient Egyptians said that as long as they are descendants of the sun god, pharaohs with true god blood can be resurrected. Second, the corpse must be intact. After the corpse is destroyed, it cannot be resurrected. In order to keep the corpse intact, the ancient Egyptians specially invented the mummification technology.
Although Xing Tian did not have the blood of the gods of heaven and earth, nor did he have a complete body, he said in the “Shan Hai Jing” that Xing Tian’s faith in loyalty to Emperor Yan still moved heaven and earth, and heaven and earth resurrected Xing Tian. Xing Tian did not have a head and he used double breasts as eyes. ,Using his belly button as his mouth, he picked up his axe and shield to find the Yellow Emperor for a decisive battle, but in fact, Xingtian’s fake eyes couldn’t see anything at all, and his fake mouth also made any noise. From then on it became a headless monster . Constantly hacking towards the sky, always fighting with an invisible enemy, what is even more tragic is that he didn’t know the skills of fighting, so his antics looked like dancing to the Yellow Emperor. The Yellow Emperor did not kill Xingtian again. So Xing Tian became a sad hero.
The story of Xing Tian is recorded in the “Shan Hai Jing-Overseas Western Jing”, that is, according to the world view of Shan Hai Jing, the story of Xing Tian took place overseas in the West of China. This place may be Denmark, so Xing Tian’s murals will appear in the suburbs of Denmark. Little church. Western scholars said that this monster is called Blemmyes. The first person to record this monster was Herodotus, the father of ancient Greek history 2500 years ago.
Herodotus heard from Memphis that Blemmyes is a country in the forest, with beasts everywhere. People in this country are headless, with eyes, noses, and mouths on their chests. Later, Western historians followed historical clues. According to research, blemmyes did exist, and they also had war with the Roman Empire.
In the records of Shanhaijing, the structure of the earth in ancient times is very different from that in modern times, and the distance between countries today is probably adjacent in ancient times.The earth has been our common home from ancient times to the present. These myths are also evidence of the interconnection between nations.
Material: pearls, aluminum wires
In this sculpture, there are two kinds of aluminum wires. The thin part represents our universe, and the thick part stands for different dimensions. It may also be parallel space or unknown knowledge. Each individual pearl is like a planet, moving along its own orbit, but they share the same space together, it is also like what we are experiencing right now, walking along their own life trajectories, but gathered in this virtual space at this moment.
Its main body is a cube. I choose to use a square as the basis is to set a reminder that I should think out of the box, always holding doubts. What we see or learn is not necessarily the truth of the matter. There are many more unknown things waiting for us to discover on this planet.