Mountain Kora: The Practical Meaning of Yiming Wang’s Art

Xiaoyan Yang 

Mountain Kora is an everlasting path.

I always wonder at the image of Yiming standing on the vast plateau above an altitude of 4,000 meters, positioning six canvases with a total length of 7 meters and height of 2 meters next to his car, and squinting his eyes, facing the awe-inspiring mountains and glaring sky, wielding the paint brush in his hand, spending an entire day unreservedly and piously pouring the colors on his palette onto the canvases. How did he accomplish such a task?

When he repeatedly ventured deep into Tibet, trudging on plateaus thousands of meters high, immersing himself in snowbergs and ridges, and painting his inner affection, what he had in mind was the destiny of human beings. Today, we live in a completely artificial environment. We cannot imagine how we could survive being away from our artificial environment. our lives became more and more attentive to trivial details and we forgot our past animality. We distanced ourselves from simplicity, yet we desire innocence; we lament the hideous pollution, yet take all our artificially transformed pleasures for granted. We even take pleasure in enjoying the mountains and waters in artificially made wilderness, unconscious that this layer of pleasure penetrated human hypocrisy and impudicity, which long ago abandoned most of the natural elements. As a result, we indulge ourselves and linger in our pleasures.

One day, as if endowed with a kind of faith, he started his action. Facing the grandiose mountains, Yiming suddenly had a reflection, further, this reflection possessed the ultimacy of natures’ moral meaning. Yiming genuinely realized that in nature’s rough enclosure, ultimacy turned into wholehearted experiences. And then, in the mountains, Yiming became a purely sentimental being; using this pure sentimentality as the starting point, he let his artistic talent from the inside of his body, from every single cell, and even deep down from the genes of life, uncontrollably spout out, and unscrupulously, uncaringly, he unleashed it on the white canvas.

Mountain Kora is the path of action. Yiming seeks to stay on this path, until he reaches Mount Everest. 

We await his action, and, we will act along with him, until we reach Mount Everest. 

April 16. 2017