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 self, become a reflection of this contemplative and searching spirit. For the past thirty years, she has consistently drawn upon deep personal emotions as the driving force behind her creations. Mari's introspection of the body is both intimate and spiritual, and through interpretation, it transforms into symmetrical patterns of emotional fluctuations, distorted human forms, and ambiguous totems of symbolism and iconography. Every detail and fragment of her shifts between the structures of reason and sensibility are mirrored on the canvas. The efforts of her search, mixed with low-frequency screams and howls, give the imagery an eerie aspect. The colors, imbued with a cult-like quality, exude a subtle unease even in their brightness, while the fluid forms shifting between chaos and clarity impart a complex psychological intensity to her work.

In the past, the psychological intensity arising from personal experiences seemed to exist only within individual histories. However, in today's modern society, this intensity appears to have evolved into a form of human experience that resonates more widely. For most Finns living in Siberia, the forest has always been their ancient home. Mari and her mom lingers in their cabin until the migratory birds start gathering, preparing for their journey south for the winter. That is nearly the last moment before the weather turns cold, and only then does Mari leave. As she mentioned in our correspondence, ‘Modernization is merely a brutal structure imposed on top of it.’ The combined pressures of the spiritual and the real world distort everything, leaving no room for escape. In such circumstances, immersion in the self and the inner world becomes more like self-deception in a state of existential deadlock. The outcome of the soul's heeding to divine calling now manifests in new ways—no longer measured against divinity nor received as grace during meditation and out of body experiences—instead, divinity and transcendence are just seen as outlets, making life itself a practice and offering a fleeting escape that seeks its justification.

A generational and cultural gap separated Mari and I, yet this has never diminished the intensity of what we’ve exchanged.

Me having conversation with Mari’s works brings a montage-like image, flashing through my mind. It rapidly descends and then focuses—from a reddened sky down to the island, through the forest from the perspective of a bird, and into the cabin she’ve been described. In the twilight glow of a summer evening, it abruptly shifts to a subjective view:

‘One day, maybe it’s when hot water poured over my head like a waterfall, each drop leaving a clear path between strands of hair, or maybe it’s when coarse linen rubbed against my skin, unmistakably brushing over every pore, all of a sudden I found myself standing to one side, watching myself. My soul gained the capacity to walk toward me, speak to me, and roam freely without constrains of time and space. At last, I could explore other possibilities of my existence in this universe. I started to reflect inward. Captured this rare opportunity, I took it as an experiment—I recorded what I saw in my day to day life (sometimes different from what others saw), and what I observed when connecting to higher dimensions of time and space, while trying to find and sketch the totems that might unlock certain channels…Somewhere along the way, I started living between the crushing force of action and reaction—I often felt that my sense were amplified exponentially! Hearing, smell, touch. I experience the world with an extraordinary sensitivity! My thoughts were sharp, my creativity and productivity soared, and I possessed everything a complete person should! Yet in an instant, I would fall into a deep low, without the energy to continue working or even living my daily life. I cried, frequently. I cried until I was numb and could no longer feel the pain around me, got no strength to question whether it was some divine punishment grinding me down for my talents.

As hot water poured over my head like a waterfall, each drop leaving a clear path between strands of hair, or maybe when coarse linen rubbed against my skin, unmistakably brushing over every pore, all of a sudden I found myself standing to one side, watching myself. My soul gained the capacity to walk toward me, speak to me, and roam freely without constrains of time and space. At last, I could explore other possibilities of my existence in this universe…’

Then the scene quickly rewinds and lifts, the falling water merging with a zooming-out gaze, the coarse linen detached from skin. The shot pulls back from the yellowish light slanting into the cabin, retreating into the emerald woods. The migratory birds fly backward and the coniferous forest rustles harshly. Perspective rises, drawing the horizon away from me, the sun grows slightly brighter as it recedes, and ultimately halts gently over the panoramic view of Kallavesi below.