The idea of making a white booklet comes from two separate, seemingly irrelevant places: one is a webpage of Chinese traditional colors that I accidentaly bumped into online, the other is the famous but nevertheless abtruse painting by Kazimir Malevich, White on White.

The webpage displays a chart, in which a variety of colors ancient Chinese people associated to with "white" is neatly laid out, forming a fascinating gradation. Those "white" colors are not exactly close to the colors labeled as white and found on the shelves of art supplies stores; they are colors, but at the same time an emblem of curious imagination and exquisite perception. How do you relate a color to moon? to flower? to mundane things we see in this world? How can one color--white--morph into so many forms other than itself?

Suprematism, from an entirely different perspective, yet offers a similar lens to look at forms, and the formless. Revolutions had been seen as an ultimate idealism, which became a great inspiration for Russian artists in that period: from Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, a monumental, imaginary tower dedicated to revolutionary deeds, to Malevich's painting, an eerie superimposition of two white blocks, physical entities are subdued by spiritual existence and freedom. The two white blocks, with their blurry edges, almost bleed into one another--they can still be two separate entities, or just one, or anything.

This spritual, almost metaphysical morphism corresponds to a Taoist belief: "great images reside in no form (大象无形)." This cultural collision, which presents itself in such a harmonious way, makes me wonder: can formlessness be perceived universally? How to convey the formlessness through the rooted materiality of cultures and time? These questions lead me to start making this white booklet, a transparent catalogue of traditional Chinese white colors.

 

I print colors, in random shapes, on translucent acetates, alongside are their ancient names, ancient explanations, and their contemporary representative--RGB and CMYK numbers. When you flip the page and press it on the previous one, colors and colors will overlap, definitions will merge, boundaries will disappear. You then see shades created, and thus new colors, new forms, new experiences will keep comming one after another, as long as you keep reading. And here comes what Suprematists insist: the new and pure pleasure upon viewing things without forms, boundaries, definitions and restrictions. 

 

I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation. -- Kazimir Malevich