An elephant in my heart: Jin Jiachen

The sky flashes with unseen meteors, and a distant herd of elephants leaves behind nineteen totems of footprints, which the owls in the forest pick up and bind into a book about the past.

 

Before a shadowy tunnel, an elder stopped in his tracks, once the first to follow the journey of wisdom, the leader, the wise man of the pack. But in this moment, he felt a certain call, something at the other end of the tunnel appealed to his soul. This tunnel does not lead to the way back, nor does it point to the place to go, it is a node that connects the present world with the unknown. In the thirteenth month of winter, the elder walks into the tunnel with determination, and the earthly past is spread behind him.
This is an unreadable elegy, in which the artist Jin Jiachen strips away the illusory shadows from the sadness and melancholy accumulated in the past, and uses them to refer to the characters who were once vividly in front of his eyes.

 

The second chapter of the book is about the senses.
The senses are narrow windows, shut up in the prison of the body, reading the blurred world through layers of mucous membranes and stung at all times by unanticipated ugliness. The senses are not familiar with each other either, and only a thin neural link feeds their information back to the imagination; what a lonely life, for which the Left eye spits out a Teardrop of sadness.

Teardrop is compassionate spirits who wish to see other sensory friends for their left eye. The persistent Teardrop came out of his eye socket and moistened the Skin on the bridge of his nose, the Skin is the most gigantic of sensory friends, silent but gentle and considerate, he learned of Teardrop's purpose and sidled across the bridge of his nose, opening the way for Teardrop to get to his Right eye. The Right eye is the twin of the Left eye, but they never really see each other. Although Teardrop could do nothing about it, he still brought a surprise. The right eye has spat out countless teardrops in the past, all of whom have dissipated into thin air and never been seen again, and the return of the left eye Teardrop is the Right eye's long-awaited reunion with its two loved ones. However, knowing that Teardrop's life was short, Right Eye was worried about the plans of this relative, and he wished that Teardrop could stay here. But Teardrop stuck to his guns, he wanted to visit the most mysterious cochlea of all. After saying goodbye to Right eye, Teardrop crosses his temples, stands before the mysterious deep ear canal and leaps down.

A long, long time later, word came from the lips, a warm Teardrop within the darkened ear canal, haloing the pinkish-green ripples, a gust of tremors awakening the sleeping soul, the shackles of the flesh wrapped in sensibility, where the senses began to mingle.

The third chapter of the book is describing the setting.

The space inhabited by the elephants is an empty universe, a pure stage stretched out from a scene, a description, or even a concept, just like the snowy country in Yasunari Kawabata's writing, which only provides a mild emotional atmosphere, completely giving way to the core narrative of the picture. The beings standing at the centre of the stage are no longer subject to the judgement of right and wrong in the story, they are no longer clear characters, but only the energy of the past that overflows and accidentally knocks on the heart of the artist and the viewer.

 

Chapters four through nineteen of the book are the same story.
The artist will quickly and honestly record every moment that touches her in her daily life, and then transform it into a work on canvas. In this process of accumulation and extraction, life becomes a grinding wheel to polish the ability of perception. Each piece of work, each local relationship, each layer of material is a comprehensive expression of matter and feeling.

This process of fusion has also been substituted by the artist in the expression of his technique: using the nature of oil-based pigments penetrating and intermingling with each other in the eraser, the artist has used the eraser, which was originally used for erasing, sanding, and fading the colours, as a tool for applying colours, so that the colours in the picture are involved with each other, and merge together into a single entity.
A completely holistic visual presentation is what the artist is looking for in a picture. The narrative of life should not have the abruptness of distortion. Even when using embroidery, a technique with a clear implication of piercing and intrusion, the artist chooses to remove the threads from the original canvas, dye it separately, and then patch it up with the canvas again. The seemingly independent relationship of the picture is in essence a flexible transformation of the self-structure; the seemingly three-dimensional effect is in essence never detached from the complete plane of the canvas.
All footsteps are pointing to the unified direction of life, not lost.

 

By this time the book was finished, a stray baby elephant blew a breath, all the chapters drifted away without a trace, and the poet of the Far Country awoke from this night's dream, and no one in the world knew the name of the book anymore.