When you spend a significant portion of your life far from whatever roots the lottery of fate and history saw fit to bury you with, you learn to sample the climate a bit differently, working through volatile networks of communication. I think I am able to recognize this mentality of artistic production, one that is familiar across times and places but always unique to itself because that is what it sets out to be—set apart from anything that is given, assumed, intended. This mentality comes with the distinct pleasure of living in a constant fog of meaning, a soft and malleable and often porous boundary between the work of living and the reality of the world as it is seemingly understood by others sharing the same social space. It is a peculiar kind of fog that sets into the consciousness of the artist (or the art writer) because it is not, as one might expect, a dulling force that clouds the vision but rather something that seeps into the crevices and cultivates a heightened awareness in which the rules of the game become hyper-clear. A dull and aching clarity; a Brechtian move that brings the ostranenie across the threshold from the practice into ordinary life, appropriates additional headspace for the practice, and in doing so turns life into the practice. Building such a life and practice requires a measure of intentionality, a commitment to thinking through what it means to live and work, as well as a degree of imagination: one must project and commit this life, even and especially when its prospects are ill-defined. In titling his exhibition project “Penumbra,” in reference to the zone of shadow in which only a portion of a source of illumination is directly visible, Daniel Pulman seems to accept the terms of this condition.

To prepare for our conversation, I looked back at the two earlier bodies of work that he has shown in Taiwan over the past few years—years that, it must be said, have been characterized by the flows and blockages of movement that accompanied the many various policy and politic responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. The first is a suite of paintings that might be prosaically described as wintry urban landscapes, or portraits from a cold and distant vantage point. The setting of each is a city street, winter, nighttime. Each contains one or two figures, bundled up, masked or hooded. The texture of the cityscape is northern China, perhaps a smaller city. Formally, there are two defining aspects to these paintings. Most obvious is the snow, which gives the artist an opportunity to relish the detail and texture of this nominally monochrome color field, building up and scraping away great impasto snow banks and tire ruts. Then there is the sky, which takes on an obscure luminosity though it is clearly night: a cold chromatic key of purple, indigo, and violet. The second body of work moves from the city to the country, and from the individual to the collective. Here we see groups of heavily tattooed men bathing in natural hot springs. Rocky cliff faces take on the fetishistic textural aspect of the work, physically growing outwards from the paintings in thick impasto constructions, while water surfaces—reflecting the planes and volumes around them—become a playful space for experiments in color.

Generally speaking, I believe it is important to think through what a painting is doing—how it is made, how its materiality turns it into a picture—before getting caught up in whether it is representational or abstract, what it might be depicting, or what kind of content it might refer to. The mechanics of a painting can tell us a lot about why an artist might be interested in a certain composition or image, while it is all too easy to be kidnapped by plot and forget we are looking at a painting at all. Turning to Daniel’s new paintings, all dated 2024, I am surprised to see that, on a formal level, they seem to be defined primarily by the interplay of light and shadow. This comes as a surprise because snowy streets and rocky cliffs are such substantial, architectonic things; they are heavy, creating their own gravity, centering the foggier stuff of human life around them in their orbits as they draw the artist’s brush in lighter concentric movements along the periphery. Light is different. Light is everywhere. In these paintings, light breaks and scatters across glass panes and through tree branches, remaking the space of the world. Here light is thicker than air, thicker even than earth. Depth of field is illusive. In its place, the golden light of day and the blue light of shadow meet in harsh collisions, bathing, even submerging, everything in their respective zones. Light becomes texture, providing the artist with somewhere to indulge the crunchiness of his material. Now we might understand why these images are so compelling: the artist has chosen to paint tigers in a zoo at dusk. Stripes on tigers, bars on enclosures, tree branches overhead; these environments are tailor-made playgrounds for light and shadow. Reflecting off of glass, slipping between bars, scattering through leaves, stepping in and out of shadow. There are forms and typologies of legibility, and these paintings are intent on inserting themselves in between the lines and mapping out their own idea of what is or isn’t real.

When Daniel and I speak, some weeks after I have begun thinking through these paintings, I have just returned from Paris, where the centenary of surrealism was feted by the Centre Pompidou in one of the few major exhibitions of the season that didn’t feel like a disappointment. The only thing that genuinely got my heart pounding was a pop-up show of inky depths, scratched surfaces, and enigmatic eyes by the painter Tim Breuer in a cavernous, bombed out storefront. All of which is to say, I am now primed for the ennui of a man with a tiger’s head caged in a post-industrial wasteland. Daniel talks about a trip to northeastern China in January, in the depths of winter, to a town perched on the edge of an open pit coal mine, the kind of place he prefers to frequent during the research phases of his practice. I think of how China’s northeast rust belt, known as Dongbei, seems to be something of a foil for life in subtropical Taiwan. Both were important territories to the Japanese imperial enterprise leading up to and throughout World War II. Across Dongbei one finds museums and memorials for the victims of the atrocities of occupation; across Taiwan one finds revitalized heritage architecture. Part of me wonders what Daniel finds so compelling about this particular region. He is drawn to the familiarity of a post-industrial landscape, perhaps not so unlike the northern England of his youth. He says that in his wanderings he tends towards the north, which for me calls to mind Millennium Mambo, in which the club kids who can’t stay out of trouble in Taipei turn to wholesome snow play in Hokkaido before returning all too quickly to their old ways, or Drive My Car, in which the answers promised by the snows of the north turn out to offer nothing but false hope.

But there is a difference between the landscapes of Hokkaido and Dongbei, even if they share the same bleak winters. There is a whole cinematic culture of the desolate northeast in China. Its road movies are not stories of buddies driving down highways but rather train films in which groups of friends, coworkers, or families move back and forth between constrained lives in the collectives and presumed or fantasized individual dreams in the cities beyond. The masterpieces of the milieu are unquestionably Wang Bing’s nine-hour-long documentary West of the Tracks (2002), shot on the outskirts of Shenyang, capital of Liaoning province, and Diao Yinan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014), which dramatizes crimes of necessity in coal-mining towns across Heilongjiang province. Films like these sit comfortably alongside a broader geography of hope and disillusionment in Chinese cinema of the past quarter century: Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Long, My Son (2019) is set in a factory town in Inner Mongolia, while Gu Changwei’s Peacock (2005) is further south in Henan. I mention this last film for how its plot relies on the titular animal incongruously displaying its plumage in a frigid zoo in the middle of winter (part of an extended metaphor for the folly of believing too deeply in romance as salvation), which brings us right back to Daniel Pulman’s Dongbei zoo and his Siberian tigers.

For Daniel there are only two places in the world, and two ways of being in the world: in the studio, or on the road. The details of location and context are irrelevant. While recognizing that we live at a certain moment in history, he approaches China with a neutral stance: with so many different kinds of cities, each of them changing at a rapid speed, it functions as something of a randomization engine for him as an artist. He can get himself somewhere, start taking photographs, and collect material that might, one day, make its way into his paintings. He only paints from his own photographs, insisting on a direct relationship to his subject matter, a restriction or convention that he brought to his practice relatively recently. I believe that it is tied to the same fog of clarity that I see in his work: an insistence on constructing meaning for one’s self, and a structure for meaning that one might impose on the world in which we live. This way of living, both of and beyond society, might best be understood as an ongoing performance of what it means to live. In wandering this barren zoo on the outskirts of a Dongbei town, Daniel performs normality. In doing so, he effects the defamiliarization of the sense of normality underlying everything, from human cruelty to the bonds that tie us as people together. I have been reading Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo, which turns from her typical use of dialogue as structuring formal device toward a stream of consciousness that emphasizes the impossibility of true communication between any two people. Understanding is a farce. She proposes chess as an example of how games can structure these attempts at communication, setting scripts and rules such that whatever happens on the board is all that happens. Dialogue without an underlying narrative in consciousness to subvert it.

Painting is an emergent property, like consciousness itself. Pulman engages in painting as a process, while we as viewers—readers—of his paintings must come from a rather more impoverished position in which we can only encounter them as finished objects, often one at a time. Before our readings are imposed on it, before it is absorbed into the economy of the art market, before it becomes an object of scholarship—and only before—painting is innocent. There is an innocence to painting prior to the original sin that is discourse. Communication is miscommunication. The painter is honest, but the audience is full of liars. In working through the light and shadow of the tiger’s stripes, Pulman aligns himself with the immediacy of the earliest forms of human art, like cave paintings of beasts and hunts. In the great beasts, in the great predators, the tigers and lions and wolves, we encounter the mystery of consciousness. It is often said that dogs inhabit the sweet spot of consciousness, open to experiences of profound joy in the moment but incapable of the existential angst that accompanies higher orders of consciousness. Incapable, too, of the implicit skepticism of human art.

Every one of Daniel Pulman’s new paintings involves a demarcation into two spaces: inside the enclosure, where the tiger stalks, and outside of the enclosure, where the spectator smokes and observes. Painting itself is what intervenes between the two. Painting is not glass; there is no painting in history that presents any kind of subject matter with perfect clarity. In many paintings effects of light and shadow play off the surface of the enclosure, constituting the visual texture of the painting. Ultimately, the tiger-man emerges through the reflection of the artist or the observer in the glass of the enclosure, which is to say: it is through the technology of the painting, this thing that divides one world from the other, that these two ways of being can be merged into one another. It is through painting that the artist becomes the tiger despite the fact that these two worlds remain separated, cleanly divided, by the porous membrane that is the painting. A hallucination of unity. Anne Carson describes the fundamental nature of desire in terms like these: we are driven, always, in pursuit of fulfilling some lack, real or perceived. The painting, bridging the world of the enclosure and the world beyond, binds together the thing that desires and the thing that is desired; the things that would touch and the thing that would be touched. Carson contrasts the fate of Midas, who died of his wants, with the cicada, who sublimates his erotic longing into the arts—into music. “Unlike Midas, the cicadas are happy in their choice of life-as-death. Yet, they are cicadas.” In choosing painting as the practice of life, as the structuring device that stands between and constitutes the boundary between self and world, Pulman accepts the terms of this life in its innocence, its immediacy, its fog of meaning. Yet, he is tiger.