Some thoughts on making work
Once, as a guest lecturer, a student asked me: “How do you find inspiration for making work?”
Tech art was just rising in the Chinese-speaking world then, and many students from technical colleges were very interested in making it.
I don’t fully remember the details of my answer, but I roughly remember the main points.
First you need a core sense of beauty — a sensitivity. It doesn’t have to be a beauty everyone agrees on, but it has to be able to move you.
Once you have that sensitivity, you need to collide with inspiration.
Most people treat inspiration as a mysterious force from outside.
When you look for it, you find that some of it is already inside you, from ordinary accumulation, many elements hidden in the unconscious. Unlike a sudden flash, this kind of inspiration is very weak, and it doesn’t strike hard. You have to be absorbed — even to the point of flow.
At that point your sensitivity rises sharply, and you can catch a small point of light.
When you catch that point of light, you start trying to expand it, like Yu Hua talking about writing a novel as a bulldozer, or David Bowie on pop (find the melody of the chorus, then grow it into a song).
It feeds on your sense of beauty and gradually spreads, even if the process is painful and compressed.
Gradually the point of light becomes a flame. Then you suddenly find yourself glad, even joyful (or agitated and in pain). That is inspiration itself, burning your own nourishment. If you stay with it long enough, you may sculpt that flame into a work.
After the process you want nourishment even more, and you look for the next point of light.