In the Autumn of 1994, I was a student at UC Irvine Studio Art. One day when I was writing my diary with the pen that has traveled with me for years, I found discontinuous lines spewing out of its nib. I realized that the pen has traveled to the end of its life. Therefore, I took a piece of letter size paper, and started to doodle in irregular directions with the pen until the ink was exhausted. This was the birth of The Last Drawing of His Life, the first work in the Pen Walking series. I later wrote a poem describing this experience. In this poem, I visit a personified pen, who, as death nears him, asks me to give him a hand and help him to draw the last drawing of his life. The strokes on the paper reveal the past we have experienced together, the plans we have drawn up, and even the smallest affection we have for each other. Until the very end of the drawing, where the end is also the beginning, the pen stops at where he set off and could not journey anymore. And this was the birth of the prose The Last Drawing of His Life.

Later, for the experiment of Pen Walking #2, #3, #4, and #5, I found brand new pens and charcoal, while using up both on a single piece or many pieces of paper. My idea was rather simple, which was to exhaust entirely a pen on paper. Here, the pen could serve as a metaphor for one’s life. The marks left behind by the pen are the deede one has performed in a lifetime, while the exhaustion of the pencil represents the destiny of the human flesh. The sixth experiment that I worked on later became the Pencil Walker (1996-2015).

All the works in Pen Walking come in pairs. Every drawing was produced by doodling with one or more pens on a single or multiples pieces of paper. The legacy of a pen is presented by its strokes and fine particles on the paper. “Pen Walking Documents” combine pens the walker, text, and image and present them in a single document.

Implied in Pen Walking series and Pencil Walker are the analogy of pen as the wheel of Samsara and the shaded, black-looking wall that started with spotlessly white the sum of ill karma that has been accumulated from lifetime to lifetime. Pen Walking views the deeds of a whole life in silence and makes one sigh on the emptiness of life, on “There is nothing I can do to change what life is.”

Even though to create works by same means of using pens to draw lines and scribbles, different meaning was generated from different context and medium. These works may imply the transmigration of the soul, atonement, and pilgrimage. At the same time, they may deal with issues such as the truth, education, inculcation, and ideologies. Sometimes, they also refer to learning, practice of moral teachings, and meditation. It can be seen that the gesture of “pen walking” does not resemble any sense of eternity, independence, autonomy, or truthfulness. As the author, my mission is to perhaps showcase the illusional fetters and possible liberation from a neutral state.