ED | Chapter 8

Shi Jiu slept for fifteen hours. When he woke up, his phone had been blowing up. He checked the time and saw it was already one in the afternoon. Suddenly remembering something, he rolled out of bed at once and began sending a voice message while washing up.

“I just woke up. Wait for me. I’ll be out as soon as I’m ready.”

This afternoon there was an exhibition auction, and two of his works were in it. The curator of the gallery had insisted that he be there in person.

Unfortunately, perhaps because it was the weekend, he could not get a taxi. Shi Jiu stood by the roadside and waited for a while before a small car pulled up in front of him. The window rolled down, revealing the person inside.

“Hey, get in.” It was Tang Tingxuan.

She looked as if she already knew everything. “I called you and you didn’t pick up, so I knew you’d fallen asleep. I even drove over to pick you up. See how good I am?”

Shi Jiu rubbed his brow and followed her lead. “Fine, you’re the best in the whole world.”

The drive was long, and the two of them chatted idly in the car. As they talked, Shi Jiu shared the dream he had recently been having with Tang Tingxuan. After hearing it, Tang Tingxuan was astonished. “What kind of artist’s dream is that?”

Shi Jiu laughed helplessly and shrugged. “Who knows?”

“That Mr. Chen, does he maybe have some kind of personality disorder?”

Shi Jiu even thought seriously about all of his behavior and said doubtfully, “People like that usually have some kind of emotional detachment. There must be something, or some feeling, he doesn’t really want to face. But, tsk, that still doesn’t seem quite right. Emotional detachment means he himself can’t feel it, not that it doesn’t exist. Yet I can’t feel any of his emotions at all.”

“Mm, strange,” Tang Tingxuan concluded.

By the time they arrived at the auction, it had already begun, so the two of them quietly moved a little farther forward. The timing was just right. As soon as this introduction ended, it would be Shi Jiu’s turn.

Two sets of images appeared on the large screen. One set was a modern art painting, the other was a sculpture.

When the curator saw Shi Jiu below, she called him up and patted his shoulder, raising her voice a little. “I probably don’t need to introduce him in detail again, do I? Oh, but I see there are some new faces this time, so let me say a few words. This is Shi Jiu, a modern artist. If I were to give a very subjective and biased assessment, I would say he is a treasure with an extreme sensitivity to art and limitless potential.”

“He graduated from the Royal College of Art at twenty-two with a master’s degree in art and information experience design. At twenty-five he earned a master’s degree in music therapy from the University of Miami. After returning to China, he also took a single-subject course in cello and went on to hold a solo cello concert. His works span music, painting, sculpture, calligraphy, and more. Of the works collected and displayed by my gallery alone, there are already seven pieces.”

Tang Tingxuan smiled with her lips pressed together in the audience, and Shi Jiu onstage shot her a look that said, Not that exaggerated!

She gave a slight nod. I know! You have to exaggerate a little for the sake of the spectacle.

Shi Jiu liked colorful clothes. He usually dressed in a fashionable, youthful way, and his outfits always gave people the feeling that he was obviously someone who made art. A white T-shirt and bright yellow work pants hung on him as if they were a size too large, making him stand out on the stage.

“He’s so handsome, and he dresses so well!”

Someone in the audience spoke, and because they were too close, Shi Jiu heard it.

“So cool. He must have a boyfriend, right?”

Shi Jiu: “…”

After the curator finished introducing him, she asked him to present his own works.

Shi Jiu took the microphone and said flatly, “I’m Shi Jiu. This is the first piece, called Projection.”

It was a white bass clef on a sheet of pure black cloth, but the clef had been cut open along the center of the stroke, forming a projection of white within black, with gray areas emerging in between.

“My idea comes from combining the concepts of visual art and music,” he explained evenly. “At the end of the twentieth century, when Europe was still immersed in avant-garde music, minimalist music had already become popular in the United States. I used to often listen to music created by minimalist composers. Once, I happened to see American composer La Monte Young in a theater trying to feed food to a piano for some purpose. That bizarre act suddenly reminded me of Sol LeWitt’s visual work created at the Olympic Sculpture Park: many perspective drawings of cubes in different colors.”

He paused there, then went on. “Since I was young, I had always been curious about the dimensions of the universe. I knew these perspective drawings were the projection of a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional one, so I began to wonder how one could abstractly, and as quickly as possible, move from two dimensions to three, just as one might ask how to make a piano eat food. And that was how the seed of this piece came about: an outline cut open on two-dimensional fabric, a bass clef opening its mouth, a flat model becoming a three-dimensional image with length, width, and height. The whole process only requires a perfectly placed cut, one that ensures the blade’s path gives the clef language as well.”

People below were whispering to each other, and the curator nodded in satisfaction. Shi Jiu then turned his gaze to the other work, a full-view photograph of a sculpture: an adult man lifting a child with both hands.

“It’s called Deep Sleep. The inspiration for this sculpture came from a dream I had when I was a child.”

In truth, he had already forgotten that dream. But during his travels, when he saw Apollo and Daphne by Bernini, the most famous sculptor of seventeenth-century European Baroque, hidden away in the Borghese Gallery, his thoughts seemed to be suddenly pulled back to a distant era, and the memory of that dream surfaced again at that moment.

In the dream, a very small child stood alone. In his eyes reflected the deep red of the sky, like blood about to drip. War and smoke filled everything around him, but death did not descend. What descended was a great deity. He stepped on eternal, unextinguished starlight, his eyes burning with unwavering resolve.

The instant he landed, he lifted the child high, above the god’s own head. Then the child dissolved into suffocating thunder, and the deity also stood there, turned to a weathered statue, like an old laurel tree. Although it was not entirely the same as the story behind this sculpture, those emotions surged up all the same. He felt a blazing love. In the whirlpool of war, he could not obtain what he sought, he was pulled in every direction, and he fled in panic.

Both of Shi Jiu’s works were bought, and for a substantial price.

On the way back, Tang Tingxuan still sighed in admiration. “What on earth is in your head? How do you even think of things like that? Why can’t I come up with these weird and wonderful things? What did your mom eat when she was pregnant with you? Let me talk to my mom and see if I can be born again?”

Hearing that, Shi Jiu laughed. “Not bad, I guess.”

“Not bad? Seriously? The dry land dries to death, the flooded land floods to death, unbelievable,” Tang Tingxuan said, rolling her eyes.

Shi Jiu shrugged, but for him, perceiving art was something very easy. It seemed he could effortlessly receive the frequency radiated by these abstract things, and all he had to do was use his own skill to help release the souls that already existed within them. He learned things related to art very quickly, and at times he felt as if he was taking a shortcut. It was not only art. His sensitivity to people’s emotions and feelings was also keen, but he credited that to his parents both being graduate advisors in psychology, with a bit of inheritance mixed in, so it was hardly surprising.

Tang Tingxuan, however, was gritting her teeth in envy.

The next few days were very comfortable for Shi Jiu, because he did not dream. He slept until daylight every morning, and he spent all his time in the library, flipping through books when he had nothing else to do, also hoping to find some new inspiration.

Our dreams are in truth our seeing, our speaking, our desires, and our actions. — Maury

The content of dreams often depends, to a greater or lesser extent, on the dreamer’s personality, age, sex, social status, level of education, way of life, and the whole of his past life experience. — Yessen

Dreams are chiefly the continual emergence in the soul of the residue of our thoughts and actions from the day. — Cicero[1]

Shi Jiu thought of something. Could the world in this recent dream be used as part of his inspiration? Or rather, perhaps this was his inspiration to begin with, already being organized in his subconscious, and then slowly revealing itself to him from the dream like a painted scroll, reminding him that it had come.

This dream was actually very interesting. The transparency of thought bringing civilizational progress, consciousness communication between person and person. That communication was completed instantaneously, which meant that in some sense they were using the fourth dimension to communicate.

This avoided many of the limitations of the three-dimensional world. Because people’s cognition was limited by their thinking and their way of communicating, even the order of their speech. Time was irreversible, and hearing, speaking, reading, and writing all had to happen sequentially, so human understanding was bound to have limits, yet people still tried to use finite cognition to interpret the infinite universe.

In dreams, time was only a measurable dimensional unit that could be stretched and compressed. All communication and cognition happened at the same time, and there was no barrier between minds. Creation would then no longer be confined to the immediate rise and fall of the present, but would carry a far more profound meaning and a more exquisite creative power.

The pen in Shi Jiu’s hand kept turning. From a certain angle, when the body of the pen happened to block the sunlight outside the window for an instant, one could even observe a tiny transit phenomenon with the naked eye.

But the greatest obstacle right now was not obtaining information from this dream, but rather,

At that thought, Shi Jiu actually found it somewhat laughable. He actually needed to deal with the people in the dream, like in a game, where if you wanted to take on a certain quest, you still had to talk to an NPC.

He had barely turned a few pages when, strangely enough, he always became extremely sleepy whenever he read Freud. Shi Jiu did not even know which page he had reached before he slumped onto the library desk and fell asleep.

That long, deep tunnel, that train called “Yellow Millet Dream.”

And the station that train stopped at was a familiar place. The moment Shi Jiu stepped out, he wanted to pull back, but as if waking from a great dream, there was no train behind him anymore. What remained was only the gun muzzle pressed to the back of his head.

The person behind him laughed softly. “We meet again.”

The muzzle shifted down to his arm. There was not even a second of hesitation before Shi Jiu collapsed.

He really did not want to sleep in his dreams again!!! Damn it!!!