Oringnal Chinese Text

林尽水源，便得一山。山有小口，仿佛若有光。

——陶渊明《桃花源记》

English translation of the original Chinese text

Where the woods ended at the river’s source, they found a mountain. A narrow opening gleamed, as if with light.

Excerpt from Peach Blossom Spring by Tao Yuanming (421 CE, Eastern Jin Dynasty)

Original English text

The river had swallowed libraries, but on foggy mornings, it whispered pages back to the banks in droplets that gleamed like unread ink.

——Charlie Lovett, excerpt from The Lost Book of the Grail (2017)

Cherney has an interest in the literary imagination of mystery that sits away distanced by a certain passage. Among the myriad depictions, water appears as such a passage through which sparks of unknown shine and lures the curious artist, paving an imagined path through the grains to the light.

Through a waterfall, Cherney conflates the diverse forms of water as an iconography for the path toward mystery. Flows from light to dark or reversed, waterfall’s dynamism commutes the eye to the abyss, substituting the verbs of Cherney’s quoted texts such as Tao Yuanming’s search for Peach Blossoming Spring and Charlie Lovett’s story of the holy grail. Situating the viewership below the abyss looking up to the light along the waterfall, the artist summarizes the poetic narratives into one simplistic form.

Following the waterfall to the lower ground, Cherney exhibits an experimental practice of calligraphy against the darker bottom. Instead of bilingually translating one piece of text, he intersperses the Chinese text and the English one in opposite directions, so that one text begins where the other leaves off, forming a circular shape of reading creative for a bilingual cultural interaction. A linguistic practice is thus performed through the structure instead of the meaning of the text.

秋麦对关于谜的文学想象，特别是相隔遥远、由某种通道连接的神秘所在，有浓厚的兴趣。在众多描述中，水是一个常见的通道：未知之光在其中如火花闪烁，引诱好奇的艺术家，在颗粒之间铺展通向光明的想象之径。

透过瀑布，秋麦将水的多元形态融合为一个能代表通向神秘所在的路的意象。由明至暗，或自暗返明，瀑布的动势引领目光流向深渊，代替了他所引用的文本，例如陶渊明的「桃花源记」和查理·洛维特的圣杯之旅，之中的动词。他将观看视角置于深渊之下，缘瀑布而上仰望光明，众多的诗意叙述遂统合简化于同一形象。

延瀑布而下至近景，秋麦在画面暗色的底端展示了一个实验性的书法创作。他不再对单一文本进行双语转换，而是将中文和英文的两个文本以相反方向交叉排布。读者可从彼此的终点开始阅读，形成一个环形的阅读结构，为双语的文化互动提供了一种新的方式。语言的实践因此从意义层面来到结构层面。