Facing such a life, you have not, in truth, seen through it.
You desire it, yet you revile it; you harbour a degree of self-hatred.
And so, you fall silent…
And your silence is the pen.
In the autumn of 1994, I was studying in the Studio Art program at UC Irvine. One day, while writing in my journal, the pen that had accompanied me on my travels for years began to draw broken, intermittent lines. I knew it was near the end of its life. So, I pulled out a sheet of letter-sized white paper and scribbled across it irregularly, moving the pen until the ink was entirely exhausted. That became my first Pen Walking work, titled The Last Drawing in Life.
Later, reflecting on this experience, I wrote a poem through personification. The gist of it was visiting a soulmate—the pen—who had little time left. He asked me to hold him up and help him create the final drawing of his life. The strokes in the drawing revealed our shared past, the draft plans we had projected together, down to the most subtle, obscure fragments of the heart... until finally, the endpoint became the starting point; he stopped where he had begun and moved no more. This is the origin of the poetic version of The Last Drawing in Life.
Afterward, in the experiments Pen Walking #2, #3, and #4, I used brand-new ballpoint pens and charcoal, exhausting them across single or continuous sheets of paper. The fifth experimental piece was what later became Pencil Walker (1996–present), a project that was stalled for years due to the lack of a suitable venue and remained unfinished. In the winter of 2006, I restarted the Pen Walking series in my ten-square-meter studio, and the pencil began to draw lines once again. This act served to release, heal, and calm the depression, repression, and anxiety in my daily life. In a way, it helped me navigate the most disheartening period of my life; at times, I even experienced a purified sense of peace and solace, finding reasons and strength to carry on.
The exhibited works are divided into two parts: the first is the Pen Walking Series, and the second is Pencil Walker.
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"Pen Walking": A series of paired works. The "Pen Walking Drawing" presents one or multiple pens flattened across single or continuous sheets of paper; the brushstrokes and shavings are all that remain of the pen. The "Pen Walking Document" presents the practitioner—the pen—in the form of a performance document combining text and image.
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"Pencil Walker": A personal ritual of penitence, an attempt to transcend the helplessness and futility of cyclic existence (Samsara) addressed in the Pen Walking series. Facing a blank white wall, the practitioner walks back and forth, continuously drawing pencil lines upon the wall. Simultaneously, the practitioner begins by reciting the Avatamsaka Repentance Verse: "All evil karma committed by me in the past, born of my beginningless greed, anger, and delusion, expressed through body, speech, and mind—all of it I now repent." While walking and drawing, the practitioner chants mantras, the Heart Sutra, or the names of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. This repetitive act of sharpening pencils, drawing lines, and chanting is conducted continuously, lasting approximately two hours and fifteen minutes per session. To date, this performance has been executed fifty times over a period spanning more than twelve years.
The Pen Walking series and Pencil Walker carry profound metaphors: each pen represents a single lifetime in the cycle of reincarnation. The pencil wall—once pure and white, now dark and stained—symbolizes the accumulated evil karma from countless past lives. While Pen Walking silently surveys a lifetime's work, invoking a sense of nihilistic sigh that "no matter what, it ends up being just this," Pencil Walker attempts to meditate before the accumulated karma of endless lives: "If a single pen can embody a person's lifetime, then in this long cycle of birth and death, what kind of life-lines am I repeatedly pacing out? Is it not an endless loop of birth, old age, sickness, and death? Is there any meaning in all this hardship? Must it continue like this?"
"Facing such a life, you have not, in truth, seen through it. You desire it, yet you revile it; you harbour a degree of self-hatred. And so, you fall silent… and your silence is the pen."
Shi Jin-Hua
August 8, 2008