There are many who burn books and erase words. Burning is performance, and erasure is a kind of drawing. We make a lot of efforts to write out a few words. No matter in what form they are kept on paper, generally speaking they won’t make the ones who’ve written them feel abashed. What’s past is past and cannot be relived again. The idea of burning or erasing won’t even occur. There is a kind of words which are subject to certain time effectiveness. Logically speaking, they expire when they are produced. The moment they are produced is the moment for their disappearance. But it is this kind of words that always leads to reproduction. The significance of reproduction does not always lie in creating value upon value. At least on the surface it appears to be contemplative. Things that have been denied by it often include the act of denying itself.

At the “Concave-Convex Exhibition”, Shen Fan gave a performance with the use of newspaper, and after that newspaper was used in his oil paintings on paper. But he never really paid attention to the words on the newspaper. It was not until a few years ago during his stay in the UK that he started to focus his study on property of words and grammatical constituents, which led to the decision to erase words. The only effective function of words is probably to create barriers for understanding through misunderstanding. If you set “misunderstanding” as your goal, it turns into barriers to dissolve barriers. As a result, on the surface it is the right to use of words that puts an end to words; but in fact it is the sense of estrangement lying beneath words that puts an end to the right to use of words. Don’t even try to believe there’ll be any exception to that. It can be said that words can be erased. Certainly, there’re always some people in the world who like to do things which seem pointless. They just want to be driven to the extremes by words, whether they erase it or not. If you think it through, you’d realize that work is tedious. In nature it’s an act of drawing lines by painting brushes. Labor is a kind of meditation exercise. The result won’t be complex and the significance varies depending on perception. After words have been erased, the punctuations that are retained seem to revive the tone and rhythm that used to be covered. Even the overall content seems to emerge intactly. To expose the sense of beauty through punctuations, like the residues left after water is drained, feels quite satisfying.

Erasure is an old technique. When artist’s contempt and political ambition expand, it becomes a convenient tool to resort to. After all, artist is artist. He never confines himself when trying to express through the black and white on paper. The destructive power lying in his work shocks and inspires at the same time. The virtue of kindness could also be perceived here as the artist leaves an entry point for people to access the island of punctuations and highlights in black the routes that are dead-end. In this way, he presents a big mystery for people to get lost, for a while.