66” x 48”, oil on canvas

Private Collection

Only the roar of existence.

Like a dish of bright red agate

Continuously fed by strips of satin

Blazes with a godlike mettlesomeness.

Everything is in this predicament.

The moon climbing into her daughter’s arms.

Houses and roads passing in and out of existence.

The crimson terraces, the city walls

Still radiating heat.

I spent the years from 1990 to 2000 writing poetry collaboratively with the poets Roo Borson and Kim Maltman as Pain Not Bread. We immersed ourselves in Wang Wei’s poetry and Du Fu’s as well. I often imagined Chang’an, the ancient Tang dynasty capital, which today is Xi’an. I imagined the ancient city disappearing, today’s busy city emerging. Things vanish, things appear. In 2010 I finally visited Xi’an and saw the Forest of Stele, where ancient calligraphy was preserved by having been carved in stone. The painting itself is influenced by Yan Zhenqing’s Yan Family Stele which is incised in a beautiful plumcoloured stone. In 2014, the painting was exhibited in the city it had imagined, as part of Zhou Yan’s Transformation of Canadian Landscape Art exhibition.