Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to interpret paintings with mere schemata. Critics have to make the effort to sort out the ideological motivation behind the images of a painting, particularly to figure out the internal threads, because those images are never plain enough for quick comprehension. That’s the very truth in the works of Mo Xiliang, whose creation is a kind of adventure full of crossroads; and for me, it’s also an adventure to go into his creation.

　　Mo Xiliang’s works all seem to have a gray tone, making the scenes so deserted and desperate. In fact, the subjects of his works are countless, for he’s always capable of finding the key to one after another fantastic and profound narrative image through his temporary perception. In some previous years, he related his works with SARS, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, train accidents, the fire at the CCTV building and so on, however, he was not diagrammatizing those events, but taking them as the causes of his weird imagination which has its own “internal logic”. He often dislocates his surroundings and experiences and replaces them with big events. So in his works, his residence becomes a field of terrorist fire, the abandoned rail turns into a disaster scene, the coordinates of a city are bombed and burned to ashes imaginatively, and the burning of corpses in a foreign conflict is linked to the bloody violence in the youth age... In the turmoil caused by frequent social disasters, this world generates infinite poetic sadness, but it’s not the single flow of poetic sentiments that gives birth to his creation depicting what he feels about the time. His works are filled with questions about authority, violence, and all sorts of identities, images and discourse construction, nevertheless, his questioning is not one-way or straightforward but puts him in a field of internal contradiction and divergence. The setting of the field bears an obvious trace of his personality.

　　In these fantastic and profound scenes, Mo Xiliang seems to have a special interest in some kind of “monument”. We can review most of his works on this thread: the towering high column building and the abruptly descending dust, the erect penis and the hammer used as a working tool... The constant shift between this and that contains the overlapping, rheology and dislocation between the solid and the discrete, the concrete and the abstract, and it indicates the construction and deconstruction of some powerful source.

　　From last year on, Mo Xiliang began concentrating the motifs of his creation on the critical thinking over some established schemata and discourse. For example, he converted and expanded the schema A Household Under the Tree originating in a simple wish of human beings, manifesting the transformation of image and meaning between traditional pasture and modern wasteland, unsophisticated tenderness and desolated isolation. And that also led to his Children’s Plan series where he employed his usual approach to change the Tree and House schema in children’s drawing, therefore, the colorful, romantic and innocent home of harmony was filtered and turned into a stagnant gray space, among which the conflict between the “external force” employed and the existing mode might be the part he’s most obsessed with. This year his works Must Trap the Paper Tiger and Kafka’s Cage Looking for Picasso’s Bird are mainly trying to construct an ambiguous pictorial parallel for the language region full of paradoxes. The etymologically confused discourse combination coated with Mao’s calligraphy is transformed into images that are bewildering and yet corresponding; “allusions” in different systems are assembled into a new pictorial narration, which is paired with a concrete three-dimensional counterpart. Quite obviously, these recent works are getting beyond the perceptive range of the normal reality, and into some kind of contemplative domain woven with multiple mirror images. Eventually, these unexpected runaways and go-astrays are bound to fall into the network of his mind which constantly improves and has no clear aim.

　　With the development of his self-deconstructive train of thought, he never ceases to change in the expression of technical language. At first he was used to manifesting some sorrowful power with bold and unrestrained strokes; gradually, to adding two-dimensional fragmental lexis into the grand and vast landscape; while in his latest works, the fragmented non-configurative wire frames are intruding more conspicuously into the pictures, leading to obstruction and destruction of the established shaping methods.

　　In short, for image structure as well as for technical language, the most important things that thread the intrinsic elements through Mo Xiliang’s works are some kind of self-deconstruction, and conflicts between contradictory language and thinking, therefore we can see in his works the trajectory of constant modification and counteraction. Or we can perhaps say, what he persists in his creation is a continuous and endless collection of paradoxes.