We know what Kafka meant when he wrote that art is the axe that breaks the frozen sea within us, because we have experienced it. We can't articulate what he means better; we just know, we understand. We've all felt the visceral impact of that axe. It's not poetry, but he's using imagery and words to convey the significance that imagery and words have for us humans. Similarly, a poet like Lorca, in his lecture The Theory and Function of Duende, came close to defining a kind of authenticity that we recognize in art, attempting to isolate it in a human voice singing a song of sorrow, echoing, he believed, a deep-rooted understanding of love and mortality that we all recognize. In an age of inauthenticity, it is easy to forget that authenticity is central to the value of art. It is an important part of how we define it; it is how we discern it. The authentic artist seeks it out in the work of others, and it is immediately recognizable to them. It speaks to life. But how to achieve it? Many writers have located the source of this emotional truth in the lived experience, so in the vein of Henry David Thoreau, who wrote in his journal, "How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live", it is natural that a painter might question themselves and look out on the world and ask: Have I lived enough to paint it?

Earlier this year, I flew to Liaoning province in northeast China to look at the frozen sea. I do not know precisely what drew me there. Perhaps, I thought, I might paint it, or perhaps there is some truth to the idea that there is consolation to be found wandering in a landscape that reflects the conditions of your own state of being or mind. Perhaps we are drawn to such places. For me, those places seem to be the sub-arctic plateau of the Cairngorm mountains in the northeast of Scotland or a windswept road cutting through an industrial wasteland on the edge of a city somewhere in the northeast of China, both best appreciated in winter.

Before leaving to travel to the sea, I had consulted satellite imagery and saw that the sea was indeed frozen and covered in a mottled ice sheet stretching across Liaodong Bay. However, on the morning after I arrived, I awoke before sunrise, and standing on the edge of the Bohai Sea, found it motionless but unfrozen, looking like a sheet of glass, piercingly clear at its edges, a bright mirror stretching towards the horizon, punctuated by the silhouettes of large, craggy shards of ice strewn along the shore.

I pottered about the shore for a while, then left the coast and resumed my journey inland through numerous cities. That was in January. The period that followed, when I returned to Taiwan, was extraordinarily productive; all the paintings in the main part of this catalogue were made after that. As you can see, the subject of the paintings is not the frozen sea, at least not the sea without.

How exactly I came to seek refuge in that zoo, one bright and crisp afternoon in winter, I cannot say right now. What I mean to say is that I know the exact circumstances of my arrival and being there, but I cannot say for other reasons, reasons which may become clear in the years that follow, or may not. It is perhaps better that I do not describe events too clearly anyway; to recount the story might reveal my motivations and themes too clearly and fix the meaning too solidly. It is better for others to find the meaning for themselves.

The gallery asked me to provide an "artist's statement" about the paintings to help them understand and explain the work to others, but I do not believe in such things. I offered to write some material for a press release instead, but after several days staring at a blank computer screen, paint drying hard in the bristles of brushes on the studio floor, I could not bring myself to do that either. It was when I was flipping through a few books that I had scattered about the place that I found an old computer hard drive lying in a dusty drawer. Perhaps it might contain some old text or statement that I could use—some snippets of past thoughts that might be relevant, I thought. The only thing of any interest was a file containing a short fragmented text, which, truth be told, I cannot be sure that I even wrote, but here it is, purportedly written by me in 2007. Like an old photograph, almost unrecognisable to me, but still, perhaps, there is a thread of pale light there, a faint outline of my reflection, some remnant of a surviving attitude or thought:

If an artist was to repeat a variation of a single image a thousand times, would the result be one of transformation? Would this process usher in a new thought, if the very purpose was to be self-transformation? Through degrees of disorder and stages of concentration, would it be possible to become a completely different artist, an entirely different person? To see differently?

The text continues:

Sometimes, after returning from a journey, one becomes aware of a shifting thought. But the journey can sometimes be so short as to consist only of taking the eye from the canvas. Painting is difficult. It is possible that if you take the day off, everything will vanish.

Also on the hard drive, dotted amongst the digital detritus, was a folder containing a few images of some paintings that I made in London around 2012. Originally, when I conceived of this catalogue, I imagined it would only include my recent work, but both Robin Peckham and Fang-Wei Chang introduced into the discussion some of my work from a few years ago in their texts. This was unexpected to me, but I am thankful to them for undertaking the task of perceptively retrieving my dispersed limbs and reassembling my body, giving me the perspective, so that I might appear to myself whole, perhaps for the first time. So when I found these images of even earlier work, it occurred to me that I might include a few of these older paintings here to reveal something more of myself, if only for it to be seen in contrast to the more recent work. For me, when I see these paintings, there is a strong sense of, for want of a better word, interiority. They were the product of being in a room, living and making art in the same room, a room that grew smaller with the addition of every painting. We were experiencing increased isolation at that time. The work, like us, had less and less discourse with the world outside. The new paintings are not like that; they originated out in the world, in my experiences and the documentary material that I have accumulated.

I remember these paintings now, but I have not thought about them in a long time, and it took seeing them to bring them back into existence for me. It is almost like looking at the work of another artist. I find it difficult to look at my earlier work not because I don’t like the paintings or think they are particularly bad, but because it brings back memories of the difficulties of life I experienced at their time of making, the tremendous energy expended in making them, the sacrifices made, and the subsequent indifference of the world.

Not too long ago, I had a dream that I met my younger self as he was just setting out to be an artist, full of hope and naïveté. I told him what would happen, how his life would play out—the years of rejection and isolation, the loneliness, the silence of the world, punctuated by occasional derision and laughter. As for how the dream ended, it was too terrible to say here. I can only say that I broke his/my own heart, and when I awoke, it was with a melancholy so heavy it was as if I was made of lead and lying at the bottom of the sea.

These 2012 paintings came from a time that was relatively productive for me. I was finally happy with the paintings, and it had taken many years to get to a position where I could feel and say that. But to tell the truth, I am now not sure how many of these paintings still actually exist. They may well be rolled around a tube somewhere in London. They might be damaged, painted over, or even destroyed. Although, I think that these were perhaps the lucky ones that survived. But for me, it’s not that important. I have lost so many paintings over the years, perhaps ninety percent of my artistic production has been lost due to the practicalities of storage, the social and financial precariousness of artistic life, and its emotional challenges.

I went through a more difficult period in the early 2000s, in which I would just make a group of paintings and then end up destroying it, and this happened repeatedly. One such time, after not seeing him for a couple of years, I saw Julian Schnabel in London, and he said he wanted to come to my studio the next day. He was perhaps the closest thing I had to any kind of mentor at that time or ever, but I had to say no. The night before, I had cut all the paintings out, and all that remained in the studio were the large wooden frames with torn canvas around the edges. Perhaps this was a missed opportunity, but I don’t think so. An opportunity needs two halves, and my half just wasn’t there. Creatively, I had a real problem; self-doubt had taken hold of me. It is very difficult to believe in yourself through long periods without validation. But the real regrets are the paintings I wanted to make but could not because of the difficulty of circumstances. Those unrealized paintings are like the dreams that you forget to write down; the inability to precisely remember them haunts you forever.

Some of these topics might seem too emotionally heavy to read or write about, too dark, but these are the real experiences and concerns of an artist, whereas the text you see describing a painting on a museum or gallery wall is not. If it’s any consolation, I can write about the darkness now because I am in the light. Of the fifty or so new paintings included in this catalogue, all painted over the last eight months, there were perhaps around fifteen others that were discarded and now lie in a big pile on a trolley in the studio. For me, this is just a part of the process, and this is progress! But this approach is incomprehensible to most artists and people. That's because we have fundamentally different conceptions of what art is.

I listened to an interview with Frank Auerbach recently, in which he seemed adamant that there is no progress in art. Unless I misunderstood, he was referring not to art history, but to his own individual progress as an artist. This ide a is alien to me. One of the primary reasons to paint is to get better at painting. This is how I function. This dissatisfaction, this striving for purpose in art, which should not be confused with striving for perfection (art is imperfect), is the only way for me to understand the significance of my own experiences and the broader historical reality in which we live.

About a month after making the Cage paintings (the more abstract paintings in which there are no animals, and I just painted the shadow of a cage cast on the wall), I came across a photograph of a work by the artist Tehching Hsieh in a book. It was a performance work, which I had seen in a photographic form in a museum more than twenty years ago. Hsieh is a Taiwanese artist whose first performance was to jump out of a window and break both his ankles. He left for America, and after several year-long “lifeworks”, he eventually gave up making art. The work I saw in the book was also titled Cage. It consisted of him spending one year locked inside a cage. Of course!, I thought. It’s the same thing: how to live? How to live with or without art? Art emerges from the intractable problem of living. The question is: how to be an artist when art, the thing that provides the most hope of connecting us with society, is also the thing that separates us from it. The truth is, today, the culture of conformity and commodification is so great that there is perhaps no hospitable place remaining for the artist to live as a functioning member of society, and no place for art. After years of struggling with estrangement, I am reconciled to this fact, but it is not easy to continue, not easy to not give up.

For years, I was almost convinced I was not an artist. "Art" is defined by being exhibited in a gallery and exists only as a part of the discourse; my work was excluded from the discourse, it did not exist. There was nowhere for me to hang the paintings like Sleepers in the Snow. There was no Salon des Refusés; by then, art had become a zero-sum game. Even now, the vocabulary of words commonly used by artists and others to discuss art has little to no meaning to me. There is no viewer; there is no studio; such concepts are not solidified for me. There is only the subject of the painting, its contemplation, and an overwhelming sense of impermanence in life.

Painting, for me, is thinking. Painting is thinking about emotion in relation to the experience (and memories of the experience) of visual phenomena. In thinking about emotion in this way, thinking about how I feel when I see something, I am sharing a common human experience: the experience of living, of finding oneself as a conscious being in a physical environment, and having encounters with its animal and human inhabitants; the sense and lack of sense of place that we feel; our preoccupations with health and mortality; social and politic al freedoms; and the way all this intersects with history and that which could loosely be described as the "condition of modernity", This is the subject of my work.

I have been thinking recently about the Tarkovsky film Andrei Rublev. I always liked his films when I was a student. Part of the film is the story of a young bellmaker whose father died without telling him the secret of how to make a bell, and yet he is tasked by a prince with the making of a huge bronze bell, which will be cast in the belief it will bring hope to a plague-stricken village. After expressing great confidence in his abilities throughout the process of casting the bell, there is an unbearably tense moment of uncertainty: the moment of truth when it is revealed that the bell casting was successful. In this extreme moment of relief, the young bellmaker breaks down crying as he reveals that all along he did not know the secret after all. Of course, there is no secret; there is only experience. Try and fail, try again, risk failure again. The true meaning of the creative endeavour is inherent in the imperfection of the results and what we learn from it. Similarly, during this last year, there were arbitrary moments during the making and completion of some of these paintings that I felt such a sense of relief that I found myself welling up with tears, such a sense of relief that I might vomit. After thirty years of creative discontinuity and struggle, I had a big studio, materials, and enough time free of distraction. I thought to myself, This is it. If you can’t make the paintings you have been trying to make all this time now, then you’ve been deluding yourself all these years. Well, I did it. I made the paintings, but what moved me was not the belief that I had made good work, it was the direct apprehension of an open path ahead, that there was a way forward, a way out, a sense that some kind of transformation had occurred, that all my past experiences actually mattered and were not for nothing.

For a couple of months, toward the end of making these paintings, my wife was abroad, and I was so involved in the work that I hardly ventured outside the studio. In such circumstances, it is easy to forget where you are or imagine that you are living in some kind of dream. But one night, I needed to pick up a parcel containing a few tubes of paint from a convenience store, which was about a thirty-minute walk away.

Exiting the gate and turning down a narrow road, I realised I had forgotten there were no streetlights, and the road quickly plunged into complete darkness. Passing huge, dimly lit buildings, timber factories, and chicken farms, between fields and banana plantations, I got a little off track. Dogs were barking, and I had forgotten to bring a stick. It is well known in the village that you should always carry a stick to wave off any of the packs of stray dogs that live in the surrounding fields. Three barking dogs ran out from a yard. I barked back, and they seemed to draw to a halt at an invisible line at the open gate.

I was just contemplating whether I should pick up one of the pieces of bamboo that were strewn by the side of the road when, in the distance, I saw a subtle burst of light that was the headlights of a passing motorbike. I realised I was almost through the darkness.

At the end of the road I began to hear the beat of a drum, and it grew louder as I walked. It was then that I saw the strange sight of two figures with large, bobbing heads, curiously oversized and alien-like, doll-like, moving awkwardly in the distance. As I grew closer, I realised they were costumed performers entering the grounds of a temple, a new temple I had heard about. They were there to perform in a folk ritual, and people were just starting to arrive. Seeing a man drumming on a big drum, the two performers, and the palanquin— no doubt containing a figurine of the local deity—resting in the corner of the courtyard, I was immediately reminded of where I live. I am in Taiwan, I thought. I am definitely in Taiwan, and I am thankful to be here.

I am a long way from the greying light of the skies above the old mill in a town in Lancashire, England, where I first entered another artist’s studio and began to paint thirty-seven years ago. A long way from the musty, carpeted rooms of Salford City Art Gallery, where, not long after, I first saw the paintings of L. S. Lowry. Or the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, where I first saw Cézanne's early painting The Murder, hung in a room with Degas and Sickert, and recognized in myself the artist that I am and would be. A long way from the boulevards of Paris, where I wandered as a student between great museums and got my real education. A long way from New York, where, as a young artist, I looked to the future with so much hope. And a long way from the room in London where I made those paintings.

Now, I live in an old house that stands on the edge of a village, on the edge of a town, on the edge of a city, on the edge of an island, on the edge of the world. On the Penumbra. But the view from here is good.

Daniel Pulman

November, 2024

Qingshui, Taichung, Taiwan