This is the second time we work together, me and Mari Sunna, a brilliant artist from Finland. Our last collaboration was in March 2023, when Beijing had just emerged from the lockdown and the winter freeze. The time of which a hint of warmth finally began to appear in the city, coincidentally matching the temperature in Helsinki. Finland has over 179,000 islands and Kallavesi is one of them. It’s a lake districts in the eastern part of the country, dotted with numerous islands, a place Mari kept mentioning in her emails to me, where she spent most of her childhood, and her father still lives. For those in the far East, Finland, located deep in Northern Europe, feels distant, mysterious, and somewhat austere. Yet in Mari’s descriptions, Kallavesi is where, even til September, the lingering heat wave of summer remains. I opened the satellite map to find Kallavesi. It appeared as a cluster of lakes and islands scattered among the fragmented fjord, making the distinction between land and water hard to discern. Mari has a lakeside cabin on one of these small islands, where she and her elderly mother stay during those months with pleasant weather. For the rest of the time her mom lives in a cabin in Päijänne-lake. There’s no electricity on the island, let alone internet, so our email exchanges often stretch across months. But in the precious Nordic summers, the nights there are brief, and the daylight there is abundant.

When looking back at history, Finland has for a long time appeared as a land that did not exist with the realm of recorded history. Perhaps it was from then that people, in response to the bewilderment faced when confronting the wilderness, began to seek an inner emotional anchor—a source of transcendence that is authentic, reliable, and entirely dependent on the self. Based on this understanding, Mari’s self and her art rooted in the s......