Art tries to decipher and enter the understood world.

Inputtime:2022-02-24 10:49:26

Indeed, linguistic diversity is unstable. In the story of Babel, this diversity is now seen as an obstacle, hindering a common human language that would allow people to communicate in leisure. When we rush toward what we do not know and what is “different” to us, a fissure—a nameless distance—opens before us. When the mind is alive, it seeks to explore and embrace practice, attempting to decipher and enter the world of understanding, yet each language is its own world. Painting is a form of speaking. It is not a clear policy of translation and communication, but rather one of interpretation and acceptance. Like speech, it possesses a logic of dissemination and multiple meanings. Jacques Derrida argues that artworks possess infinite meaning, acknowledging that his theory of interpretation is subject to misunderstanding. Among all the new terms appended to the philosopher’s name, “différance” is the most famous. For Derrida, deferral and difference, often on Jiang’s lips as a policy, are inconceivable and infinite. Its trace is hidden, erased, forgotten; we can only speak of it through the traces left after its erasure or through the series of other words it generates. It has never been inscribed in any text. No single word can encapsulate it. Thus, for Derrida, speech “takes a detour” between what is inscribed by speech and what is not: deferral and difference. This means intruding into self-enclosed discourse to welcome an incomprehensible “guest,” who will sooner or later speak in other ways. Jiang shows us that true communication involves exposing oneself to someone utterly different without fear of the resulting transformation. To achieve this, one must continually confront discomfort and heterogeneity—that is, radically opening oneself to the Other... Jiang’s portraits are about a particular compassion toward the world and ourselves, which is not simply given, but must be occupied from the outset. Speech hurls us out of ourselves and into the real world and toward others. It plunges us into disorientation, into verbal battles. To find a better direction, we must lose this battle. From interaction to coexistence, from gray zones to rainbow brilliance, from mutation to evolution, from digital to imitation—Jiang depicts the confusion of words and the unbridgeable distance between human beings.