INTRO
With all of Pink Noise's images, its texts, right down to the choice of paper, finally settled, the project had, as far as I was concerned, graduated. And just then I made a trip to the Northwest.
This was Dunhuang again, seven years on. This time we had chartered our own car, so I finally got out to Yumen Pass, and saw the Han dynasty Great Wall — "those heaps of dirt" — and a ruin called Dafangpan Cheng. At first glance they are not much different from the yardangs; look closer and the yardangs are coarser, these heaps finer-grained, and up close you can make out traces of something like reeds. The Han wall especially: ridge upon ridge. If this were the handwriting of wind, it would not be so finely divided. I imagine the archaeologists of the day found the marks of human labor in exactly such minutiae, and so confirmed that they were made. The mounds of Dafangpan Cheng are more primitive by comparison, because after all they were once walls — high, with holes punched through them as if by rocket fire, standing there proudly in the light two hours before sunset, dissolving into a pale blue sky that owns two or three clouds, like a rock stratum issued specially to the Northwest, standing for hundreds of millions of years, carved for hundreds of millions of years. Luckily humanity hasn't gone extinct yet: they noticed that this particular set of dirt heaps was not ordinary, looked into it, found it to be the family estate of the ancestors, and decided it had better be fenced off properly so that more of their own kind could come and pay their respects. The collective narcissism of the species keeps the noise from being truly "pink" — but it made me more certain than ever that I was looking at pink noise realized. It happened to be early summer. Wait until midnight and look at the zenith: Altair, Vega and Alpha Cygni make the Summer Triangle. Alpha Cygni's old Chinese name is Tianjinsi, Fourth Star of the Celestial Ford, and it lies more than two thousand light years away. Meet its gaze, and the light it casts into your eye set out at the moment this town, this line of walls, was built. At that moment, the background music of the universe is heard.
Every image in Pink Noise comes from Hong Kong. Hong Kong, the summation of contemporary industrial civilization: towers packed shoulder to shoulder into the hills, the living space of ordinary people compressed to its limit, a daily rhythm tuned to capitalism's maximum efficiency. This ultra-high density, physical and spiritual at once, makes me doubt from time to time the justice and the necessity of human existence. From ignoring it to being curious, from criticizing it to making peace with it — all of it condensed at last into the set of analogies that is Pink Noise. If in Hong Kong pink noise was a conception, then in Dunhuang what I saw was the background music already playing. Hold on. That phrasing sounds familiar.
I went hard at my old files, and sure enough — seven years ago, the first time I went to Dunhuang, I had written a short piece that ended like this:
"The three days in Dunhuang went by very fast, like living through a flash mob, and back in Hong Kong we all felt a strong spiritual maladjustment. By most definitions Dunhuang and Hong Kong look like a pair of antonyms. Dry against humid, cool against sweltering, open against cramped, level plains against concrete jungle. But along the axis of history they seem very alike: when land routes ruled, Dunhuang happened to sit at the midpoint of trade between China and the West, and so became a hub of cultural exchange between them; when sea routes ruled, Hong Kong — loosely speaking the finest deepwater port in the Far East — took up the same role without hesitation for the trade and culture of today. Dunhuang once thronged with carts and horses, Hong Kong now a world of flowers and lights: the way the two cities came into being and grew turns out to follow one and the same line. Unexpected — and then, thinking about the logic behind it, entirely reasonable. A thousand years from now, will Central be fenced off for viewing the way the Xuanquan Post Station is, with tourists across the Shenzhen River gazing up at the platform on Victoria Peak and sighing, ‘Cuan Sanmiao yu Sanwei’[1]?”
So the line of thinking behind Pink Noise had drawn a much larger closed loop. I hadn't realized it myself: seven years ago, fate walked me to a node of thought. I remember that after coming back from Dunhuang I kept wanting to pursue something metaphysical, and right around then I met Tim, and the formal exploration of art began, naturally enough. I thought Pink Noise was a four- or five-year project; in fact it had been fermenting for seven. I thought I had found a marvelous metaphor; it turns out fate had assigned me the topic long before.
So I am only a speaksperson who happened to be chosen — to grind and fabricate a principle of nature by human means, and then tell it to humans. But to be chosen is already enormous luck.
[1] Shang Shu (Book of Documents): Sanmiao is an ancient confederation of tribes in early Chinese history that resisted the central authority. The quote describes the legendary wise ruler Emperor Shun punishing unruly tribal groups Sanmiao to bring order and peace to the realm, by exiling them into Mount Sanwei, which is located in the western frontier, near present-day Dunhuang.
Pink Noise 在大西北
在Pink Noise完成了所有图片、文本直至选纸的一系列工作后，它在我这里是彻底“毕业”了。恰在此时我去了一趟大西北。这是七年之后又一次去到敦煌，这次因为是自己包车，终于去到了玉门关，看到汉长城“那些土堆子”，看到了一个叫做大方盘城的遗迹。乍一看，和雅丹的区别不大；细看，雅丹更粗糙，这些土堆子更细腻，贴近了还可以看到一些像芦苇的痕迹。汉长城尤其明显，一棱一棱，若说是风的痕迹，不会如此细碎，我想当年的考古学家或许就是从这些细枝末节里找到人类加工的痕迹，确认它们的人造成分吧。大方盘城的土堆相比起来更原始，因为毕竟曾经是墙，高耸，墙壁上有洞，像被火箭炮射穿过，在日落前两小时的日光下，骄傲地站在那里，融进坐拥三两朵云彩的淡蓝色天空，像大西北特供的岩层，站了亿万年，雕琢了亿万年。还好人类还没有灭亡，他们发现这一组土堆子不一般，检查一番发现它们是祖宗家业，得好好圈起来让更多的同类前来瞻仰。人类群体的自恋，让噪声不再“粉红”，但让我更加确信，我看到了粉红噪声的实现。刚好是初夏，等到午夜往天顶看，牛郎、织女和天鹅座alpha星构成夏季大三角，天鹅座alpha古称天津四，距离我们两千多光年，与之对视，它投射进你眼睛里的光，便发射自这个城、这组城墙建造的时刻。这一刻，宇宙的背景音乐被听到了。
Pink Noise的所有图片都来自香港，香港作为当代工业文明的集大成者，嵌于山间鳞次栉比的高楼，极度压缩的普通人的生存空间，资本主义极致效率的生活节奏，这些物理与精神意义上的超高密度会让我不时地怀疑人类存在的正义性与必要性。从无视到好奇，从批判到和解，最后凝聚成Pink Noise的一套类比。如果说在香港，粉红噪声是一种构想，那么在敦煌，我看到的是已经奏响了的背景音乐。稍等，这个表述似乎有一些熟悉。
我狠狠地检索了一次历史文档，果然七年前第一次去敦煌，我曾经写过一小段文章，结尾是这样的：
“敦煌的三天过得特别快，像是经历了一场快闪，回到香港我们都感到了强烈的精神上的不适应。敦煌和香港在许多定义上似乎都是一对反义词。干燥对潮湿，凉爽对闷热，开阔对拥挤，一马平川对石屎森林。但从历史的维度上看，似乎又很相似：陆地交通占主导地位时，敦煌恰好是中西贸易的中点，从而也成为中西文化交流的重镇；海洋交通占主导地位时，香港作为（不严格地说）远东第一深水港，也当仁不让成为现今中西贸易与文化交流的节点。曾经车马骈阗的敦煌，当下花花世界的香港，作为一个城市发生成长的脉络竟然如出一辙，意料之外，思考背后的逻辑似乎又是情理之中。不知道再过一千年，中环会不会像悬泉置一样被围起来参观，隔着深圳河，游客们远眺太平山顶的观景台，感叹一句“窜三苗于三危”？”
至此，Pink Noise的思维脉络竟然画出了一个更大的闭环。我自己都没有意识到，七年前，命运把我带到一个思考的节点。记得从敦煌回来以后，我总想要进行一些形而上的追求，刚好在那个时间认识了Tim，便自然而然地开始了对艺术领域的正式探索。我以为Pink Noise是一个四五年的项目，但其实它经历了七年的发酵，我以为我曾发现了一个绝妙的比喻，却不想是命运一早给我的命题作文。
所以我只是被选中的一个发言人，把一种自然的道理用人类的方式研磨、制作，然后讲给人类听。但是被选中，已然是一种巨大的幸运。
In Sep 2026, the physical book (ISBN：978-1-957011-52-3) is published by bookanicals, Tianjin, China, and can be purchased here.