A ROSE IS A ROSE

Let Yourself Be Amazed

— Wei Jiang

Recently, I attended a photography exhibition titled A ROSE IS A ROSE (即心即物) by the young Chinese artist Qin Siqi, who has been living in the United States for ten years. Before becoming an artist, she was an outstanding swimmer, which, as she describes, endowed her with extraordinary perseverance and a sharp sensitivity to her body, forming the foundation for her photographic creations.

Qin Siqi’s photography encapsulates stories that allow the heart to settle. A young person leaves their old environment and moves across the ocean to live and study. While she may still maintain ties with her homeland, she also strives to create a new life in the new world. She begins to understand the meanings of home and roots, while experiencing both freedom and belonging.

For an artist, only through experience and feeling can one avoid being blind to the truth. A person stands in the wind, perhaps unable to judge the direction of the wind or predict its strength, but they can feel the wind's temperature on their skin and hear its howling with their ears. The wind passes by, leaving everything untouched except the human heart, which moves. The wind allows one to sense their position in time and space, while the heart makes one feel their existence even in total silence. The heart is always loyal to itself, to the inner world. If a person strays in their youth, swims the wrong way, do they choose to drown in the old river or save their soul? Simone Weil, in Gravity and Grace, wrote, “We have nothing; contingency will destroy everything… except the right to say 'I'…”

I do not believe that Qin Siqi’s visual dialogue between the human body and flowers explores the subconscious or is driven by libido. These works are not mere extensions of surface life, but continuations of her entire world. People often live purposefully in the material world, while in the immaterial world, they live without purpose. However, no matter the lifestyle, one’s circumstances are realized within oneself. It is through the countless instances of disintegration within these circumstances that one becomes their true self.

Everyone lives on the path to becoming themselves, and every circumstance exists within the body. Destruction and rebirth are one and the same. Thus, the initiative in Qin Siqi’s artistic creation lies in her ability to actively choose the experiences she wants, even in the face of all circumstances. The freedom to live and to experience lies in the moments when one is aware and can still assign meaning to their existence.

A person’s life experience is like a pebble in the river of time, extending from this moment into the future, tracing the evolution of existence. Through learning, traveling, and creating, Qin Siqi gathers these shining stones, letting them gradually accumulate, building a bridge to her self-world. This world may be even more ancient, profound, and stable than the reality she imagines. Perhaps this is the value of visual art and the reason she immerses herself in it so fully.

...A ROSE IS A ROSE (即心即物) exudes an extraordinary sense of quiet and expression. Humanity and soul crack open within it, leaving a deep impression: the heart is difficult to define. This world, though materially rich and full of form, can, when viewed as a whole, be seen as a picture of will; life, despite its ups and downs, is, when viewed in its entirety, a movement of emotions. These photos are both somber and poignant, yet serene and clear. Only through such somberness can one deeply explore, with sensitivity, the core; only in serenity can one gaze at flowers through a curtain or see the moon through water, imparting a sense of emotional resonance to the viewer.

I believe Qin Siqi has enough wisdom not to demand or expect herself to include all possibilities, viewpoints, or clashes in her work, for that is impossible. It is meaningful to stay true to her own experience at the time. Unique fragments with her own taste are a real part of her being. The preciousness of direct experience lies in its uniqueness, in the "word and object / tightly connected / with the same body temperature / in both the word and the object." In this direct and intimate relationship between word and object, Qin Siqi’s images “are like me / simple words / exuding the breath of humanity.”

An artist presenting a narrative to their audience should necessarily shape it into a linguistic inevitability. Qin Siqi’s visual language is her confession. Her language is where each viewer can encounter both her and themselves. The concepts of “flower” and “body” are imbued with multiple cultural meanings: they can both present evidence of existence through color and light, and also serve as part of nature, like white paper that embraces the breath of life. The artist, balancing light and weight, simultaneously sees her self-image and her position in the external world: she imagines her uniqueness while being one of the many, daydreaming on the subway, waiting in line in a crowd.

Qin Siqi employs specific objects and the rules of realistic depiction, giving ordinary things sensory details that make them believable and transforming the intangible into something concrete. With this focused and clear vision, her work essentially seeks greater intimacy and loyalty, abandoning ordinary concepts of identity and will, transcending what we think we already know, and entering into a new relationship with the multiple possibilities of existence and its ultimate strangeness and infinite mystery.

What kind of experience is this? Throwing the Ball Like a Girl includes a series of essays by American feminist political scientist Alice Marion Yang about the female body. Yang discusses several issues, including the body’s relationship with clothing/space, starting from the unique posture of girls throwing a ball. The habitual body often influences an individual's interaction with the world around them. This explains, from another perspective, why women sometimes feel hesitation and self-imprisonment when venturing into the outside world. Yet Yang also finds that in such ambiguity, there lies the primal power to explore new life experiences—one of fluidity with the external world, neither submissive nor controlling. This journey begins with “rediscovering the living body.”

I recall the famous Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, who, in her essay Negotiating with the Dead, referenced the metaphor of “Alice in Wonderland.” At the beginning of the story, Alice is on one side of the mirror, which can be seen as one side of life. The other side, her reflection, is the artistic side, where she transforms into an opposite version of herself. But Alice does not break the mirror, choosing the solid, bright side of life over the artistic; instead, she crosses through the mirror, merging with the imagined, the dreamlike, and the non-existent Alice. When Alice’s life returns to the waking world, it carries with it the story of the mirrored world.

Thus, visual works can be self-aware creations, originating from an awareness of the world, clarified by formal analysis, and resonating with both body and poetry. A single image can simultaneously address these four aspects, and I believe Qin Siqi is already on her way to achieving this. A person is like an eternal riddle, allowing themselves to be amazed, actively, passively, and imperceptibly reaching the realm of feeling everything—this is the vitality and covenant of creation.