1

The 16 artists gathered here, including the curator, are all female. Is it aggressive? Is it provocative? Is it more—or less—politically correct? No.

2

The origin of the interjection "duo" can be traced back to the Pre-Qin period. It evolved into "duo duo", an expression of wonder and accusation, during the Eastern and Western Han dynasties, and eventually ended up as part of the menacing idiom “duo duo bi ren” (to be aggressive), a term coined by Lady Wei of Eastern Jin in the comments she wrote for her disciple Wang Yishao (Wang Xizhi) more than a century later. As for how the overbearing four-character idiom became associated with the flighty phrase “mei ren’er” (pretty woman), one has the 20th-century translator Cai Hongbin to thank for: confronted with the French phrase “La Belle Noiseuse” (the beautiful troublemaker), which originated from Honoré de Balzac’s fictional title of a 17th-century painting, was cited repeatedly and expanded in Michel Serres’s Genèse, and eventually became a compact phrase that contains various possibilities as well as countless noumena and their images anchored to the turbulent sea of ideas, Cai came up with the Chinese translation “duo duo bi ren de mei ren’er” (aggressive beauty).

3

Characters, words, sentences—they all come from different backgrounds, belong to different classes, and are met with different fates. The fact that a phrase appears in its present form does not necessarily mean that it ought to be so, or that it will keep generating the exact same meaning. The idioms we often take for granted and look at without seeing are really hanging by a hair. They are gone before we realize they were there. Exhibitions are the same. We fix our eyes on the ever-changing world, attempting to stop or capture a moment, to organize and hang it up with makeshift grammar. What you see is yourself: your deafness, your muteness, your stupidity, your fool's dream.

4

Should one imagine the existence of order, or surrender to this chaos wholeheartedly, acknowledging the authority of chaos with different materials, sounds, and colors? Suppose we can still put together some sort of voice that activates, or at least responds to, the so-called rhythm of the world? Or should we resort to becoming strangers sleeping in the same bed, tell the detached to make haste in their detachment, and urge the runaways to hurry up and run away? I choose the latter.

5

I flew apart the first time I came across the phrase "La Belle Noiseuse" in Genèse. Numerous faces and bodies rushed in like huge waves, like the ebb and flow of tides. They tugged and pulled, denying me ungenerously and granting me generously the same things: who I am and what I am.The moonlight bustled, dazzling and deafening. The genealogy of art grew madly, dropping and covering the ground with fruits of contradiction.

6

The audience of this exhibition must read Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece (Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu). This is also the advice (more like order) M gave E, his comrade and the executor of his will, on the eve of the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital. He described it as a “chef d'œuvre full of delightful irony." [1]

7

Please believe me, no matter what you are reminded of when you look at the title of this exhibition—especially gender protests, feminism, feminist consciousness, etc.—they are too reductionist, too sure of themselves, and too rigid in comparison to the discussion I intend for this exhibition but am almost certainly unable to carry off. If I have to make a decision as a curator, I'd rather you believe that the belle noiseuse we have here is ultimately unknown and meaningless. This conclusion would seem closer to Serres’s philosophy than Rivette’s film.

8

“Everything is founded in the possible,” wrote Serres, “all representations originate in the belle noiseuse, all states come to us from chaos. The most common forgetting is that of the possible. It is so much forgotten that it is not visible.” [2]No matter how strange it all seems, how harmonious or incongruous the artists' works look when they are put together, no matter whether Space A and Space B choose to enthrone or dethrone each other, we need enough contradictions and disintegrations. Only when we hold on to unrest and change like this can we persist in being present and standing out in the synonymous structure of gender from inside out.

9

The practice of judging something by its name won't work here. Because we are dealing with a citation of a citation of a citation; there are enough twists and turns in the citation process to blur any concrete meaning. However, you can still judge something by its name—Whoever is a troublemaker, is beautifulOrWhoever is beautiful, is a troublemaker.

[1]: Marx to Engels, February 25, 1867, Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976; https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867/letters/67_02_25.html

[2]: Michel Serres, Genesis, translated by Geneviève James & James Nielson, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1995.