What “Sojourns of A Stranger” presents accounts for only a small portion of the works produced by Hu Xiangcheng during the past decade. Nonetheless, this small portion is stunning enough. In today’s context of art criticism, it seems that the creativity of an artist is no longer reliable or of much value. What people talk about the most is tediously exhausting notions such as concept, strategy and cultural identity as if art has been reduced to become simply a tool for sociological study or statement making. Hu Xiangcheng’s exhibition and practice could be deemed as a refutation to that. He often calls himself a “shape-making” artist (rather than a plastic artist). As far as he’s concerned, it is both a gift and a mission for artists to create images. The “images” he creates via the use of some of the simplest materials constitute a series of obscure codes that look like mysterious patterns from a different world. Hu Xiangcheng takes the role as a messenger of that different and unknown world, a modern version of Hermes whose duty is to show us the mystery.

It’s quite intriguing for Hu Xiangcheng to name this exhibition “Sojourns of A Stranger”. Today everyone of use carries two strange lands, two systems of symbols and meanings with us. The one is so-called the “west”, and the other, the “tradition”. The two are equally ambiguous and beyond reach. From his point of view, culturally speaking we are always strangers in a foreign land. Moreover, the title to him has another layer of meaning. In the face of today’s globalization, we share the same world, a world that is highly crowd- ed. Information technology has completely overcome the problem of distance. As Paul Virilio put it: we live in a world no longer based on geographic expanse but on a temporal distance constantly being decreased by our transportation, transmission and tele-action capacities. The new space is a “speed-space” rather than a “time-space”. In this world, all things take place inside the world and no one can ever draw a boundary line. However, it is in such an unprecedentedly integrated world that people feel all the more lonely and isolated. While the physical gap has been greatly shortened, the gap on the psychological level has been widened. All people become the familiar strangers to others. Everyone tries to build a city with mirrors to surround themselves. Heraclitus said: “To those who are awake, there is one world in common, but of those who are asleep, each is withdrawn to a private world of his own.” The reality we are faced with today is that we are awake more than ever, but in the meantime, we fall asleep into our own private worlds.

Within this collective state of dream, it seems Hu Xiangcheng has managed to carve out a new and unfamiliar route in a world that is familiar to us all. It’s a labyrinthine journey within the world of everydayness. Heidegger used to describe the forest paths “that meander deep into the forest, leading unsuspecting travelers to nowhere.” People take different paths but within the same forest. There’s no single thoroughfare that could lead you directly to the destination, but people could enjoy the different sceneries along the process. To get lost is also a chance to get enlightened. Artist, in nature, is an embodiment of the spectacular miracle of the encounter of the everydayness along the forest paths. In the history of art, numerous geniuses have attempted to hold onto such miraculous encounters. Surrealists may call it “meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella” and modern poetry tends to depict it as “defamiliarization”. But Hu Xiangcheng treats it like an ordinary encounter between an ordinary guy and some strange mystery. It enables him to constantly radiate the power of “natural emergence” that is widely considered a trait unique to poets of the Romantic era. And it is exactly such power that has led to the creation of the unfamiliar images and objects we now see.

Most of the works on view have something to do with Hu’s sojourn in Africa. In a way, we can take the exhibition as a cultural dialogue that takes place within an individual. The purpose of dialogue is not for agreement as we know the word “Dialogie” in ancient Greek means “to say it in the opposite way”. “To say it in the opposite way” is actually of great importance. We need a stranger, or say “the other”, to say something in the opposite way inside our mind and our culture. Only in this way can our mind and experience be imbued with the power to become a sound battlefield or a truly magnificent palace. But the problem is how to keep “the other” permanently in the state of being “the other”? How to maintain the sense of unfamiliarization? Such is the challenging mission for us while pondering on issues like cross-culture and cross-region! Probably that’s the reason why Hu Xiangcheng has entitled his personal cultural dialogue “Sojourns of A Stranger” – it mirrors the traces a wanderer leaves behind, physically and psychologically, within a strange world.

Even in the place that is most familiar to him, Hu Xiangcheng still treats himself as a stranger. We tend to meet this kind of stranger on the streets. They always carry with them a sense of the farawayness, reminding us of the horizon that is beyond our reach and the places that are far, far away. We look forward to seeing landscape from faraway through the “Sojourns of A Stranger”.