The Xanadu (in the Day)

作品賞析

We live together with too many other lives that we ignore. They each live in their own mandalas. In this forest depicted by the artist Lin Yi-Lung, there appear many living things that are not quite human, not quite beastlike, but the light radiating from their heads adds to their sacrality. This strange fantasy scene has a name impossible to understand—“The Xanadu (in the day)”—with “Xanadu” made up of three characters that make no sense placed together, but if we remove the “wood” radical in each of the three characters, we are left with the characters for “ear,” “mouth,” and “eye,” and three “woods” put together make the character for “forest.” It turns out that there are three trees in the forest, symbolizing ears, mouths, and eyes respectively. They are clamped in a triangular shackle, and there are seven small snakes crawling on the trees. Lin Yi-Lung uses meticulous etching to reproduce a world that belongs to a different time and space from ours. He believes that the world was originally composed of separate things, which were then connected by time and space into a constantly circulating world. These fantasy creatures from the start have existed in the world’s corners, but we have not met them yet.