Nine Dragon Heads NOMADIC PARTY
. . .tracking bliss, trusting instincts and welcoming the unexpected. SILK ROAD#1 . .NW China . .Dunhuang, Talikiman desert, Hami, Gobi desert, Tan Shian mountain, Urumqi
        
there is an old Chinese tale about Confucius and his disciples visiting a famous waterfall to meditate, but on arriving finding the river in full flood and the waterfall a raging torrent. Suddenly something caught their eye diving into the churning mist of the waterfall. A few moments later a wirey old man emerged from the boiling waters, water and hair streaming down his back. Confucius asked one of his disciples to go ask the old man what magic he used to survive such dangerous waters. " no magic !" The old man replied. "just in with the whirl and out with the swirl".
this is the art path, tracking bliss, taking risks, trusting instincts and welcoming the unexpected. Tracking and following our bliss is knowing what it is we wish for, what to trust our life to, and then trusting instincts to dive in with the whirl and go with the flow.
One of my bliss-wishes for long enough was to travel the Silk road, fired in part by a mythical flight of the dragon yarn through alien and dangerous lands (the metaphorical flight of the spirit), and of course by the exotic yarns of Marco Polo, and more recently by William Dalrymple's book In Xanadu, an account of travelling the silk road shortly after the Chinese re-opened the route in the late 1980s. In all, a romantically nomadic vision of journeying on foot, horse and camel and car through ancient cultural and trade routes, . . a vision soon, however, to be shattered, when 9DragonHeads travel the stage1 silk-road project.
Every imagined notion was replaced one after another by the industrially gritty, the starkly real, the wildly surreal and the dadaesque party of 30 diverse and highly individual artists, somehow miraculously co-operating together in the spirit of welcoming and expecting the unexpected. In with the whirl and out with the swirl!
One short anecdote typifies many. We took a long awaited bus trip across the Gobi desert from Dunhuang to Hami, full of anticipation for a vast and slowing changing desert landscape that we might stop in occasionally to experience a still and remote expanse of desert sand and dunes kissed by a boundless sky and horizon, steeped in silence and mystery. No so! Instead, in the middle of the Gobi desert road we encountered a traffic jam of giant proportion. Busses, cars, trucks and more trucks, many articulated with long trailers carrying every material of human consumption, clogged the road nose to tail as far as the eye could see in both directions along the one and only highway, two-laned, long and straight.
Motors impatiently revving, horns parping, tyres churning in the sandy tracks alongside the motorway as impatient busses and cars attempt to overtake the queue, ours included, only to find yet more and more mechanical beasts baking in the afternoon sun, blocking the way. The upside! we got far more opportunities to stop and explore the edges of the desert than we could ever have anticipated and despite the trip extending from 8 hours to 12, there wasn't one in the party who felt the adventure of bathing in the blistering bliss of the Gobi with this incongruous line of vehicles clogging the road from one extreme of the horizon to the other, was anything other than gob-smackingly amazing, surreal and unforgettable. And so were the full ten days of tracking our bliss on the silk road, part1.
Every one of the artists could, I know, recount a similar tale of suprise and disbelief from the heightened reality of every day, or from surreal dreams in short hours of snatched sleep . . short sleeps for fear of missing something.
To checkout the NOMADIC PARTY exhibition at ARKO Art Museum in Seoul, google Arko, Nomadic Party
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