Xuanzang, who messed into the urban jungle, created a slow torment

◎ Yao Jianan

It will not be easy to find a "pure land" in Hong Kong at the end of March. Everyone was on the way, shuttling from the cracks of the Basel booth in Hong Kong to the opening ceremony, luncheon and party, all huddled in the dense itinerary and doing their best to be decent and "admire" as much as they could.

After almost all the social energy was consumed, after two days of hustle and bustle, he stopped in front of the stone steps of the laundry in Tai Kwun and leaned in, only to get a trace of peace and comfort - in the semi-open exhibition space that was enclosed and caged, Xuanzang (played by Li Kangsheng) in a red robe lay quietly in the center of a white paper, and there was no audience on the staircase seats. This person, this Buddha, seems to be a stone statue lying in a deep grotto.

Coming and going

Trying to use words to retell what Cai Mingliang's "Xuanzang" played, in the end it could only end up in vain. As a theatrical performance, it is so "bland" that it becomes a collection of verbs: sleeping, walking, chanting, shaving one's head, eating, drinking, drawing, folding, and "bland" to become a collection of images: Xuanzang, spider, tree, moon, lotus, red, white, black. The play is generated between these verbs and nouns, and in the combination of verbs and nouns. The serenity I felt when I stood on the stone steps probably came from this blandness. Because he is already familiar with the whereabouts of Cai Mingliang's "Xuanzang"—in other words—"Walker", he no longer has the curiosity that he should have before the start of the play, but replaces it with a displaced, pre-satisfied feeling.

Perhaps except for the staff, no one knows when Xuanzang fell asleep. It's a play with no beginning. After the curtain call, even if there is no gaze from the audience, Li Kangsheng may continue to walk with Xuanzang's straight, empty eyes. Therefore, it is also a play with no ending. "Come from the Tang Dynasty in the East and go to the West to worship the Buddha and seek scriptures" - this well-known line of "Journey to the West" has lost its default utility at this time, and in the theater, it is classified as a Buddhist verse of "from where you come from, go to where you go".

After the commotion at the entrance gradually subsided, actor Yanon sang a Laotian song. No one can understand it. "Don't we often hear someone singing in a different place, and we don't know what they're singing, but we stop and listen inexplicably, and even be moved, isn't it?" Cai Mingliang said. Anon reminds us of a "place" that we have come to, but does not tell us exactly where, except vaguely recognizable from the accent of the lyrics, which may be southern. The significance of this opening song is not to suggest the background, but to convene, where all the identities of the audience are erased, and everyone becomes migrants in the desert through which Xuanzang travels.

Thoughts

Xuanzang was still asleep, as if this singer had nothing to do with him. Gao Junhong, a painter dressed in black, took the stage and drew the first spider on a white piece of paper in a prostrate manner. The sound of black charcoal rubbing against white paper is amplified by sound, like the sound of the wind in the desert. It is an action that challenges the daily auditory experience, and the sound of spiders crawling in the dark night, so difficult to capture, becomes so three-dimensional in the painter's labor, and even becomes a metaphor for theatrical time and space.

After painting about three spiders, the painter began to erase the first visiting spider with the palm of his hand. One by one, the spiders came, one by one the spiders crawled away, and the spiders left on the white paper and the shadows of the spiders were finally connected by black spider silk, connected to the edge of Xuanzang's red monk's robe, until a sparse web was formed. In several interviews, Cai Mingliang mentioned that the spider is a reference to Ryunosuke Akutagawa's short story "Spider Silk". In the novel, Gandhartha climbs the thread of spider silk descended from the Buddha and crawls up from the pool of hell blood. Because he wanted to take this thread for himself and drive away the sinners who came with him, the silk broke—"Only the spider silk of the Pure Land of Bliss, still thin, shining with a silver light, half short and not long, hanging in the middle of the sky without stars and moons." The spider silk that symbolizes salvation and the fragility of human nature in the novel is probably not so lofty in "Xuanzang". The Buddha remembered Gandharta's kindness of releasing spiders, and there happened to be a spider by the Lotus Pond, so he took the spider silk and drooped to hell. The black spider silk on the white paper is the entanglement and fluttering of thousands of "moving thoughts" - they envelop Xuanzang's body in his long dreams with mortals.

After drawing more than a dozen spiders, the painter lays the charcoal horizontally and begins to paint from left to right until the spiders disappear into black. The rumor continued, only getting fainter. During the more than ten minutes of painting, the painter occasionally stopped to wipe his sweat. When the "night" covered the day of Elysium, the "facts" became clearer: it turned out that Xuanzang was sleeping in the night, and the trees, crescent moons and lotus flowers that the painter then sketched with a pen and eraser were originally the habitats of Xuanzang's body and spirit. "However, the lotus flowers in the Lotus Pond of Bliss do not pay attention to such things. The crystal white flowers are as white as jade, stirring the calyxes and swinging at the feet of the World-Honored One...... "The end of "Spider Silk" is a calm scene, as if the tragic turn of Gandha's multiple falls into hell has never happened, or that the impermanence of good and evil and the change of people's hearts have long been the normal state in the Buddha's heart, and it is not worth worrying about.

wait

Is Xuanzang also a mortal?

The blackened white paper has been folded into a square futon, and the awakened Xuanzang sits on the futon and recites scriptures, drinks water, wipes his mouth, trims his face, strokes his head, eats pears, and maintains cleanliness and physical strength, which is no different from mortals. It's just that everything is slow. Some of the audience members silently withdrew, probably because they couldn't stand the slow pace of the theater. In this second chapter, which begins with awakening, Xuanzang carries out his daily routine and continues to walk day after day - in the four sides of the futon, in the four sides of the white paper, Xuanzang always walks along the edge, walking for nearly an hour.

The intolerability with time is understandable. In "Slow Theatre", the slow motion of the actors usually creates a sense of sculpture and uses time as a perceptible material to infect the audience's body and mind. The mental arithmetic of the flow of time is carried out in almost all the non-traditional dramas in which the audience watches an attempt to achieve some kind of direct aesthetic and sensory experience through acceleration and deceleration of time and repetitive labor, constantly touching the threshold of consciousness consciousness. What is the real challenge of "slowness" for the audience? Presumably, it is not the endurance (this is the challenge of the actors), but the eyesight and understanding. In the subjective eye, behind the slow gaze is the act of exploration, the emotions such as curiosity, warmth, lingering, contemplation, and compassion, as well as the search for memory or the imagination of the future.

The mystery of Xuanzang's "slowness" lies in the fact that this slow flow of time is in line with his identity and his purpose. The curvature of every fold on Xuanzang's red robe, every step of Xuanzang's walking, and every detail are gradually accumulated in the audience's observation, and form a reminiscence of his long journey.

The slowness in the theater is different from the "slowness" in Cai Mingming's "Walker" series of short films. From "Colorless" (2012) to "Where" (2022), it is still Li Kangsheng's red-robed Xuanzang, who walks in all kinds of urban spaces with extremely slow steps, in corridors, corners, and in the gray space of the city, Xuanzang's slowness is contrasted with the speed of human flow, thus highlighting the "wonder" of slowness. "The time of modernity meets the Buddhist time represented by Xuanzang, played by Li Kangsheng. Lin Songhui writes in "Walking Slowly in the City: Cai Mingliang's "Slow Walking Long March Series" and the Spectacle of Time Practice" that "Buddhist time" is "a continuous moment or scaffold that can reveal itself." Sitting in the theater and watching the crowd coming and going on the screen and the slow Xuanzang, the audience experiences a twofold "mental arithmetic of the flow of time": the comparison between slow and fast in the video overlaps with the "present tense" of quietly watching, which highlights the wonder of "slowness" and the isolation of "modern time" from "Buddhist time". In the theater, all the sets except for the blank paper were removed, and the chaotic and disorderly "fast" that could be compared was cleaned up in the synchronicity between the audience and Xuanzang.

Dried

I've been thinking about what Li Kangsheng's eyes contain, the kind of eyes he has always had in Cai Mingliang's films for decades, low, silent, simple and moist eyes, containing intuition. Intuition was deposited in Li Kangsheng's eyes, in Xuanzang's eyes, and he lived spotlessly, so ironed. Xuanzang raised his eyes several times without meeting the eyes of any audience, but looked into the distance or at the ground. In the penetrating gaze, there is no obstacle, and it always represents Xuanzang's "Wuzi".

I also wonder what kind of mysterious reaction there is between the cleanliness of this "vulture" and the slight "uncleanness" in the theater. Those "unclean" elements include the music that suddenly sounds during the silent walk (Doris Day's "Sentimental Journey", Du Huan's "Male Burning Clothes"), including Xuanzang's crumbs falling from his mouth on the robe and the ground when he "eats bread" in the second half, the folds of the white paper, and the question-like echo left by Gao Junhong's final charcoal tap on the white paper. "Sentimental Journey" is jazz, and Du Huan sings Cantonese opera in the Qing Dynasty, both of which have a time difference with Xuanzang's prosperous Tang Dynasty. Is this also a hint of time and history? Is the crumbs, folds, and echoes also a hint of weathering, peeling, and impermanence, like the absence of a Buddha statue? Keeping quiet in the midst of the noise, like a mortal continuing his daily journey, is about the mysterious nobility of Xuanzang.

"Xuanzang" reminds me of artist Li Mingwei's live performance work "OurLabyrinth". For 90 minutes, the dancers move slowly, constantly sweeping the rice on the ground with their brooms. What is "cleaned" is the dust of the soul, and the "winding path" formed by rice is the subtlety of the soul. The same is true of artist Song Dong's performance work "Water Diary", which has continued since 1995, writing a diary with clear water, recording in vain day after day, practicing the dialectic between purity and complexity. In this sense, "Xuanzang" is actually more like an "act", but from the image of the "walker", from the traffic of the city to the theater space, passing through the present that cannot be paused.