Cartography of Belonging, chapter 39 from The Works (2026)

For years I thought I was making paintings.

Looking back, I see a different story.

The Chinese poems slowly dissolved into calligraphy.

The calligraphy dissolved into gesture.

Gesture dissolved into fragments.

The fragments became hundreds of small cards.

The cards slowly transformed into landscapes.

Not landscapes of mountains or cities, but landscapes of memory, movement and attention.

I photographed those cards, enlarged tiny details and painted them again.

With every step, language became less important.

Not because I wanted to abandon it,but because I wanted to move beyond it.

Words had guided me for years.

Now I wanted to discover what remained when words could no longer be read.

The paintings were no longer asking to be understood.

They were asking to be entered.

I no longer painted images.I started mapping a world.

Not a geographical world.

A world of relationships.

Of memories.

Of silence.

Of invisible paths connecting one experience to another.

Every card became a coordinate.

Every line suggested a direction.

Every empty space became part of the map.

Looking back, I realise that the poems had never disappeared.

They had simply changed their form.

Language became landscape.

The viewer no longer reads.

The viewer wanders.

The poems had never disappeared. They had simply changed their form.

Language became landscape.