Paradise 2 — Daoguang Wen

Paradise 乐园

"Every person's true calling was only to arrive at himself. He might end up a poet or a madman,a prophet or a criminal—that was no concern of his; in the end it was meaningless. His concern was to find his own fate, not a random one, and to live it out, full and complete.Everything else was a half-measure, escapism, fleeing back into the ideal of the masses—conformity and fear of what was inside yourself."

Hermann Hesse’s "DEMIAN: THE STORY OF EMIL SINCLAIR'S YOUTH" is a novel that influenced me deeply, telling the story of the young Sinclair's difficult journey to find his own way. Under the guidance of the novel, I began to find my way through the project of "Paradise ". In "Paradise", I explored my inner world through visual images and tried to express my state of being.

I tried to find or construct signifiers that are relevant to my heart in a forest near my residence, to express my state of existence in allegorical visual language and to explore possible spiritual outlets. The night is calm and dangerous for me, and my inner feelings become clear at night, so all the images in the project were taken at night. The forest at night is imaginative, where small animals and mysterious powers appear, I constructed three types of spaces: earth, air, and water, projecting the mysterious, lonely, and melancholy inner world into it, allowing the self to return.

During the construction of “Paradise”, I had a private and deep dialogue with my heart, resulting in images that were extremely personal and metaphorical. As a medium for expressing abstract consciousness, image language is like a boat that helps me set off from the forest of the real world and slowly arrive at the paradise of the spiritual world.

“对每个人而言，真正的职责只有一个：找到自我。然后在心中坚守其一生，全心全意，永不停息。所有其它的路都是不完整的，是人的逃避方式，是对大众理想的懦弱回归，是随波逐流，是对内心的恐惧。”

《德米安：埃米尔·辛克莱的彷徨少年时》是一部对我影响颇深的小说，它讲述了少年辛克莱寻找通向自身之路的艰辛历程。在小说的引领下我通过《乐园》开始寻找自我的道路。在《乐园》中我通过视觉图像向内探寻自己的内心世界，试图表达自我的存在状态。

在《乐园》中，我尝试在住所附近的一片森林中寻找或搭建与我的内心具有关联性的能指，用寓言式的图像语言表达自我的存在状态以及探索可能的精神出口。夜晚对我而言是平静而危险的，且内心的感受会在夜晚变得清晰，因此项目中所有图像都是在晚上拍摄。夜晚的森林是充满想象力的，小动物和神秘力量都在这个乐园中现身，我建构了大地空中水面三种类型的空间，将神秘孤独忧郁的内心世界投射到其中，放任自我的回归。

在“乐园”的建造过程中，我与内心进行私密而深层的对话，因而产生的图像是极私人和隐喻的。图像语言作为一种表达抽象意识的媒介，如同一只小船协助我从现实世界的森林出发，缓缓抵达了精神世界的乐园。