“A Thousand Years of GoodLife”(or a literal translation, gathering thousands of propitiousness, oversteep and towering land) is not a common term. Rather, as a relativelyprimitive axiom, one that has been living in the hearts and minds of HanWuzhou’s antecedents. Every time he left his hometown Anyang, his grandfather’swell-wishes had always been much more majestic than the “gentle and modestorchid” words uttered in Jiangnan, which always moved Han Wuzhou to sorrow andgrief. On the one hand, the burdened hardship of the plains, for generations,their wishes had been nurtured by the Yellow remain unrealized; on the otherhand, in the last two decades or so, he has been relying on medication to alleviatephysical pain, the physical, circumstantial and family hardships seem entirelydisparate to these wishes.

Fate sets Han Wuzhou on thecourse of being a sentimental type of artist, he minced these words andwondered why the wishful thinking buried in the hearts and minds of his antecedentscan be as surreal?

A similar type of curiosityabout Han Wuzhou is equally common. He likes to inquire into things, todiscover certain logic, without receiving a university education or be taintedby “sophisticated selfishness”, he’d often come up with formal and logicalanswers such as, “If one were to choose live a day happily or in sadness, thenwhy not sadness?”

More importantly, he’s thepractitioner of his own theories. “Text of Prayers” are “letters written to theheavens” when Han Wuzhou accompanied his mother on temple visits. From thisworld to the heave, mother and son went on two different directions of the samepath, where the mother believes “the spirit would answer to the devout heart”;and the son believes “heaven will answer to the will of man”, so “seeing snowin May” manifests the wrath of heaven due to the sorrow of men. Would differenttypes of interpretation actually matter, Han Wuzhou is willing to accompany hismother on her visits to the Buddhist temples, because only when the sense oflife is above life itself, would there be art.

Art is the most effectivecure. Modernization has provided us with more choices, while we seem to be morelost than ever. The disconnect between the goal and means to it present deeperreasons, it is the distrust of the internal dialogue that the narrator tells inone’s subconscious, or in other words, narrations are done without any desireto do so. Han Wuzhou doesn’t seem to have such problem, for him, art is not amean, he doesn’t use it to reach an end, rather, he’s found his place in thework he does.

The new solo exhibition, “HanWuzhou – Ten Thousand Years of Good Wishes”, opening on November 5, 2017, willpresent four (sets) of new works, revealing the issues he has been personallyconcerned with. If we were to retrospect his four solo exhibitions, Han Wuzhouhas always been accurately captured the body, the relationship evolved aroundthe body; locale, and the dissonance at the bottom of society that is relatedto a particular region. His position to crawl on the ground, has given him agrounded sense of existence and the experimental quality in art.

- Wang Guangle